What Is The Matter With Transcendence? On The Place of Religion in The New Anthropology of Ethics

What is the matter with
transcendence? On the place

of religion in the new
anthropology of ethics
Joel Robbins University of Cambridge
A focus on ordinary or everyday ethics has become perhaps the dominant concern in the rapidly
developing anthropology of ethics. In this article, I argue that this focus tends to marginalize the study
of the ways in which religion contributes to people’s moral lives. After defining religion and
transcendence in terms that make them less uncongenial to the study of ethics than many proponents
of ordinary ethics suggest, I examine values as one sometimes transcendent cultural form that often
informs ethical life. I draw on Victor Turner (along with Durkheim) to develop an account of how rituals
often both present people with and allow them to perform transcendent versions of values. These
encounters, in turn, shape people’s ethical sensibilities, including those they bring to bear in everyday
life, in ways we cannot understand unless we accord religion a more central role in the anthropology
of ethics than it has played to this point. I illustrate my arguments with material drawn both from
Turner’s Ndembu ethnography and from my own research on Christianity in Papua New Guinea.
As early as Robert Marett’s 1902 essay ‘Origin and validity in ethics’, he announced
that ethics was one amongst several ‘organised interests’ of the human spirit that move
people to action, and he went on to note that feeling was central to its ability to
accomplish this task, since ‘thought unsupported by feeling is powerless to found a
habit of will’ (1902: 233, 240). A consultation of Marett’s later book Faith, hope and
charity in primitive religion (1932) confirms that he had not abandoned this idea by
the time of his 1931-2 Gifford Lectures, and he was then even inclined to see religion
as most importantly a source of feeling, and at least ‘primitive religion’ as a source of
those feelings that turn moral thoughts into spurs to action. Something like these issues
that preoccupied Marett makes a late appearance in my own attempt to relate ethics and
religion in what follows, though admittedly the key lines of debate and the theoretical
tools I will want to bring to bear on them are so different from Marett’s own as to be
nearly unrecognizable from within his framework. It seems clear, we might say, that
from his time to ours everything has changed. Everything except, that is, the most
important questions, which still have a familiar ring. So while I will start elsewhere than
a close reading of Marett’s work, and I will end up somewhere other than he did, I hope
the echoes of his concerns are audible none the less.
Marett Lecture, 2015.
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 00, 1-42

C Royal Anthropological Institute 2016
2 Joel Robbins et al.
Having already signalled a rapid shift to a more current idiom, let me turn
immediately to noting that the very rapid growth of interest in the study of ethics has
been one of the most notable recent developments in anthropology. From a marginal
or at best background concern at the end of the last century, the anthropology of ethics
has come to approach the status of something like a key trend in the contemporary
discipline. With the ambition to lead a major reassessment of many core aspects of
social theory – most notably those that hover around the nature of human action – and
the promise to do so while opening up new horizons for ethnographic work by helping
us attend to kinds of data we once ignored, the study of ethics has quickly achieved its
lofty position by generating interest quite broadly throughout anthropology. Indeed,
cross-cutting sub-disciplines and regional concerns, ethics is one of the few topics that
is even a candidate to provide some unity to an increasingly fragmented field in which
specialists more and more frequently struggle to find interest in work produced beyond
their regional, topical, and theoretical borders. Having made its way to the main stage
of our sprawling discipline, the study of ethics is set to make a significant mark on how
anthropology is practised for the foreseeable future.
There are surely many reasons why the anthropology of ethics has taken off so quickly
in the last several years, many of them related to the fact that looking back it is easy to
see that it was absurd that it took so long to develop. It seems obvious now, in ways it did
not even fifteen years ago, that to have a human science that ignores the role of ethics
in personal and social life has to be a mistake. So the anthropology of ethics points to
and then fills an important, almost embarrassing, gap in disciplinary thought, and the
relatively straightforward claim that it does so has to be part of any story of its recent
success. But along with that explanation, I would like to suggest that another reason
the anthropology of ethics has generated excitement so widely in the discipline is that it
has spent a lot of time at the frontier stage, in which there is as yet no normal science to
stifle creativity and experiment, and in which the arrival of virtually every new journal
issue holds out the promise of some novel approach to the topic worth looking into
(Robbins 2012a). Those with an interest in Aristotle, or ordinary language philosophy,
or the anthropological linguistic study of interaction, or phenomenology, or however
we want to classify Foucault, or even the classical social theory of Durkheim and Weber,
all make contributions, and they can do so while studying all manner of topics, from
state-level politics to kinship, from gift-giving to lying, from sickness to healing, and
from religious piety to cutting-edge business practices. To this point, the anthropology
of ethics has pitched a broad tent, and it is surely in part its habit of welcoming all
comers that has allowed it to do so in the discipline’s centre ring.
Using an older terminology indebted to Thomas Kuhn (1996 [1962]), we can call
the welcoming quality of the anthropology of ethics that I have just described a pre-
paradigmatic openness. I have mentioned it, and its likely role in the explosive growth
of the field, because I have a sense that the era marked by this radical openness might
soon draw to a close. In the last few years, more and more people who contribute to
the anthropological study of ethics have come to define what they study as ‘ordinary’
or ‘everyday’ ethics. Ever since 2010, when Michael Lambek edited a landmark volume
with the title Ordinary ethics, one has seen that phrase and its near cognate ‘everyday
ethics’ with increasing frequency in the literature. They have become terms to conjure
with, and this has been an important development, adding some momentum towards
theoretical progress to the anthropology of ethics to complement the widely creative
but in no sense cumulative tendencies that have marked its frontier phase, and equally

What is the matter with transcendence? 3
notably generating real critical debate where once there had been mostly parallel play
(e.g. Clarke 2014; Lempert 2013; Parkin forthcoming; Zigon 2014). To draw again on
broadly Kuhnian terms, the rise of everyday ethics signals, I think, that an intellectual
maturation of the anthropology of ethics is afoot – it marks the advent of what Morgan
Clarke calls ‘“discreet disciplinary pressures” as to what one’s proper subjects ought to
be’ (2014: 419) when one turns to the study of ethics – and it seems likely that to whatever
extent the anthropology of ethics does develop towards a state of normal science, it will
be one that itself highlights the social equivalent of such normalcy as it unfolds under
the sign of ordinary or everyday life.
The increasing focus on the ordinary and the everyday, and the normalizing sense
of disciplinary momentum it has brought to the anthropology of ethics, are all to the
good, and I hope that nothing in my foregoing narration of its ascent to prominence
suggests otherwise. But of course every vantage-point has its blind spots, and in what
follows I want to take up one of the potential limits of the view from the ordinary
and the everyday. The potential blind spot I am worried about is one that obscures the
contribution of religion, or of the transcendent, to ethics. Religion is not necessarily the
opposite of the ordinary and everyday, but as an exercise it is worth considering such
standard antonyms to these terms as ‘extraordinary’, ‘exceptional’, and ‘unusual’, and
noting that these terms all apply to the sacred and to religion more generally. Understood
as it often is in these terms, the sacred seems a notion that does not effortlessly inhabit
the world of the ordinary and the everyday.
I recognize that these quick semantic observations invite all kinds of quibbling, but I
make them by way of introducing a more empirically grounded point, which is that up
until now, religion really has not been central to the theorization of everyday, ordinary
ethics. Thus Lambek’s and Veena Das’s influential, founding theoretical statements
of the ordinary ethics position do not draw on theories of religion, even as they do
sometimes take up Austin-inspired accounts of ritual performativity as an aspect of
everyday linguistic interaction.1 And James Laidlaw’s (2014) path-breaking book-length
construction of the field, which, while not framed as a work of ordinary ethics per se, is
in sustained and careful dialogue with this development, likewise does not draw much
on theory of religion in laying out its approach. There is an irony here, of course, in that
Lambek is one of the leading anthropological scholars of religion at work today, and
Laidlaw, like many others who contribute to the ordinary ethics discussion, would also,
in his other work, count as an important contributor to this field. All of these scholars
are comfortable handling religious materials, which, for example, make up the majority
of the examples in Laidlaw’s book. But, I want to suggest, considerations of the nature of
religion as a phenomenon, as opposed to empirical data on religious life, have not so far
figured much in these authors’ construction of anthropological theories of ethics. My
ultimate aim in this article is to ask what difference it would make were they to do so.
The ordinary and the religious

Though most of us probably have a strong sense that we know everyday life when we see
it, the ordinary and the everyday can be somewhat elusive notions when one approaches
them with definitional intent (Sayeau 2013: 8). And in a critical mood one might want
to note that they also have a history, and mostly a modern one, and so as concepts
they are not always as innocent or uncomplicated as they sometimes appear to be. For
present purposes, however, it is enough simply to indicate how those who promote the
study of everyday or ordinary ethics reflect on their own use of these terms. Two widely

cited statements from the key figures in the field whom I have already mentioned are
worth exploring in this regard. After referring to Aristotle to make the point that ethics
is first of all ordinary in the sense that it is ‘basic to the human condition’, Lambek, in
his introduction to his volume on ordinary ethics, goes on to add that, ‘[s]econd, . . .
the “ordinary” implies an ethics that is relatively tacit, grounded in agreement rather
than rule, in practice rather than knowledge or belief, and happening without calling
undue attention to itself’ (2010a: 2). Das, who, like Lambek, relies in part on work in
ordinary language philosophy, asserts in somewhat similar tones in an essay entitled
‘Ordinary ethics’ that what is called for is
a shift in perspective from thinking of ethics as made up of judgments we arrive at when we stand
away from our ordinary practices to that of thinking of the ethical as a dimension of everyday life in
which we are not aspiring to escape the ordinary but rather to descend into it as a way of becoming
moral subjects (2012: 134).
From this point of view, ethical work ‘is done not by orienting oneself to transcendental,
agreed-upon values but rather through the cultivation of sensibilities within the
everyday’ (2012: 134, original emphasis). It is not difficult to detect, even from these
brief snippets of text, a binary scaffolding on which the sense of the everyday at work in
them rests. The everyday, at least in these accounts, is for the tacit against the explicit,
the practised against the known or believed, sensibility over values and rules, and the
imminent over the transcendent. If we take all of the discarded terms together – the
explicit, the known and believed, the codified rule, values, and the transcendent – it is
hard not to suspect that religion is an important part of what the everyday is not, and
what ordinary ethics does not, to use a favored expression of Das’s (2012: 138, 146), ‘leap’
over into.
The point that the everyday is decidedly not religious is even occasionally made
explicit, at least in passing, in the texts from which I have been quoting. Thus, in noting
that ethics is ordinary because it is ‘basic’ to human life, Lambek suggests that
it need not be singled out as an explicit category or department of human thought nor constituted,
as Maurice Bloch (1992 and elsewhere) sees religion and as some philosophers have seen metaphysics,
at the expense of the ordinary (2010a: 2).
He then goes on to contrast everyday settings to contexts that at least sound religious
in which ethics does become explicit, such as ‘in prophetic movements of social and
ethical renewal; and . . . among priestly classes attempting to rationalize and educate’
(2010a: 2). And turning again to Das, one of her aims is to show ‘how dramatic
enactments of ethical value, as in publicly performed rituals . . . , are grounded within
the normative practices of everyday life’ (2012: 138). Here religious ritual is secondary,
and more generally in ordinary ethics a turn to religion on the part of the people we
study has a slight tinge of a fall from grace. Religion – with its supposed habits of
distanced reflection, love of explicitly formulated rules and values, and tendency to
speak in imperative tones – is only necessary for those who somehow cannot work out
their ethical lives in the comfortable immanence of the everyday. A harshly lit realm
of imposing, codified demands, rather than quiet, smoothly unfolding skilled practice,
the transcendent appears from the ordinary point of view as an agent of rough justice
at best, and a source of profound alienation from truly ethical human living at worst.
The goal of my argument from here on out is to suggest that this is not a fair account
of the religious or the transcendent. For one thing, as Webb Keane (2010: 69) has
reminded us in one his contributions to the anthropological understanding of ethics,

human beings really do sometimes stand back from the flow of their lives – it’s the kind
of thing that, as human beings, they can do, and often enough they resort to it. Such
standing back, I want to suggest, is not less basic to people’s ethical existence than their
ability to participate in the flow of everyday life. And for another thing, what humans
learn from such exercises of standing back from or ‘leaping out’ of the everyday can,
pace Das, informs their everyday ethics at least as much as it is grounded in them. For
these reasons, I think the anthropological study of ethics would be impoverished if it
were reduced to the study only of its ordinary, everyday forms, and in fact maybe the
everyday itself does not make sense without some attention to the religious as well.
I am going to develop my argument in two steps. In the first, I want to present
an understanding of religion as at least in part a matter of the transcendent, and
more importantly to offer an image of the transcendent that is not as scary – neither as
metaphysically alienating nor as demanding – as it often appears to be from an ordinary
ethics point of view. Then, in the second, I want to look at one form of transcendent
religious representation – the representations of values produced by ritual – to begin
to sketch a picture of how religion informs ethical life in ways that do not explain away
or traduce its everyday qualities, but that at the same time do not leave them to stand
wholly on their own.
On the transcendent
Our English word ‘transcendence’ is derived from Latin terms that mean ‘to surpass’ or
‘to go beyond’ (Harvey 1964: 242). Merriam-Webster on-line suggests that current
usage stays close to these roots, offering as the first two glosses: ‘exceeding usual
limits: surpassing’ and ‘extending or lying beyond the limits of ordinary experience’.
The sense in which the transcendent is defined in opposition to the everyday is evident
here. It is, however, worth pausing over what we want to mean by ‘exceeding’ and
‘surpassing’. In some sense, I think these can be taken as simply descriptive terms,
pointing to a slightly less freighted notion of being ‘beyond’ the ordinary than we
might be tempted to imagine. But they also carry with them some sense of the elevated,
the excessive, or the magisterial that ordinary ethicists point to when painting the
transcendent as awe-inspiring and commanding in ways that block the desirable flow
of the everyday. It is this sense of the imposing quality of the transcendent that I want
to dial back here, though not mute entirely. Put more positively, I want to foreground a
kinder, gentler side of the transcendent that we might take to enrich rather than destroy
the everyday, even as it does not collapse into it.
But before I turn to illuminating the friendlier face of the transcendent, let me pause
briefly to note that I am happy to identify religion with the transcendent more generally.
I do not want to dwell on this point, which would immediately detain us in the deep
waters that churn around the very cross-cultural validity of the concept of religion, but
mostly wish just to accept it for the purposes of the argument I am making. Durkheim’s
minimal definition of religion as pertaining to sacred matters that are beyond and
sharply separated from profane ones paints the religious as transcendent in relation
to the everyday in a straightforward way that I am happy to take on here. Thomas
Csordas’s (2004) identification of religion with alterity, to take a more recent example,
points in broadly similar directions. Even as I find intriguing the suggestion made by
proponents of axial age theories that some religions stress or greatly extend the distance
of the sacred from the profane, such that we might differentiate religions from one
another on the basis of the varying degrees of transcendence upon which they insist, I

will work here with the less elaborate assumption that all social phenomena we might
want to call religions are built around at least some notion of transcendence (Robbins
2009). Taking this point as given from this point forward, the question I want to ask
is how we might best think of the transcendent realm of religion when our primary
goal is to contribute to the anthropological study of ethics. Should we see it primarily
as a realm from which issue fearsome divine commands or distressing encouragements
to leave behind the worldly concerns of the everyday altogether, or might we see it as
having a different kind of contribution to make to ethical life?
A good starting-point for reconsidering the nature of the transcendent is the work
of Alfred Schutz, the well-known social philosopher with strong connections to both
Husserl and Weber. It is Schutz’s phenomenological side that most interests us here, since
it leads him to argue that transcendence is inescapable in human life – for there are always
things that are important to us that are outside our immediate perceptual experience
but that we can represent to ourselves by means of various kinds of signs. Based on
the different ways in which the things we represent to ourselves are beyond immediate
experience, Schutz lays out three categories of transcendence: the ‘little’, ‘medium’,
and ‘great’ transcendencies (Schutz & Luckmann 1989: 105). Little transcendencies are
those in which the transcendent item is presently beyond our immediate perceptual
experience, but could have been part of that experience in the past and may be so again
in the future. When I leave the living room to enter the kitchen, the living room is now
transcendent in relation to my immediate experience, though I can always turn back
and make it present once again. Medium transcendencies, for Schutz, are other people,
whom we realize have an inner life like our own which we can never experience directly.
The inner experience of my friends can never be present to me the way the living room
can, but Schutz suggests that it is still the case that we feel we can overcome the gap
between us much of the time. Therefore, he asserts that the little and the medium
transcendencies are alike in that the ‘boundaries of experience that are being crossed
are everyday ones, and the crossings themselves are likewise everyday ones’ (Schutz &
Luckmann 1989: 145). By contrast, the great transcendencies, which include religion
(as well as theoretical thinking and dreaming), involve objects we realize we can never
experience directly in everyday terms. We have to leave everyday life, or what Schutz, in
Husserlian terms, calls the natural attitude, and adopt an ‘unnatural attitude’ in which
we take a distance from our normal practical motives and structures of relevance if
we want to experience such great transcendencies in their immediacy rather than just
represent them to ourselves (Schutz & Luckmann 1989: 125, 130).
On Schutz’s model, as I have just laid it out, we are entangled in transcendence all the
time, so in itself transcendence is nothing special. As he notes – in a statement I think
is worth pondering more thoroughly than I am able to here for what it suggests about
how to think about the everyday – without representations of transcendent phenomena,
what he calls ‘appresentations’, ‘a person would remain to a considerable extent caught
within the limits of the flux of actually present experiences; without the appresentations
themselves, completely caught. There would be life and lived experiences, perhaps even
encounters, but no life-world’ (Schutz & Luckmann 1989: 132, original emphasis). Thus
the everyday is shot through with, even constituted in large part by, transcendence.
But even so, the great transcendencies, and religion among them, do in experiential
terms take us beyond the everyday. They build on very basic human experiential and
representational capacities, but to produce effects that, we might say, are not themselves
quite so basic.

Unfortunately, Schutz does not give us much of a sense of the kind of things that
are represented in the great transcendencies. He tells us how we can get to religious
transcendence without having to abandon representational paths that have a lot in
common with those upon which we always walk, but he does not tell us what to expect
inside the transcendent realm once we enter it. For that, we are going to have to turn to
some anthropologists.
Helpful here is the work of Maurice Bloch, who has recently offered an account of
religion that roots it in the human cognitive capacity of imagination. Though Bloch is
working in a different theoretical lineage than Schutz, I think there is enough overlap in
their concerns, particularly a shared interest in the nature of different kinds of human
cognition, that we can usefully draw on Bloch to help us get beyond the point where
Schutz leaves us. At the heart of Bloch’s model of religion is a distinction between what
he calls the transactional and the transcendental social. The transactional social consists
in the give and take of everyday life, a fluid arena open to change in which people assert
themselves, sometimes manipulate or try to influence others, and more generally (and
here I am drawing on some of Bloch’s earlier work – see Bloch & Parry 1989) work
to reach relatively short-term, sometimes fully achievable, goals (Bloch 2008: 2056).
By contrast, the transcendental social is made up of ‘essentialized roles and groups’
of the kind social anthropologists have long taken as the prime constituents of social
structure (2008: 2056). People see these roles as more or less immutable and fixed.
Individual occupants of idealized roles may leave them for various reasons, including
role failure and death, but the roles and groups will continue to exist. It is for this reason
that social structure in general appears to people to have a ‘permanence which negates
the fluidity of life’ and therefore transcends it (Bloch 2012: 114). For Bloch, then, the
transcendence of the transcendental social has to do in part with being impervious
to the flux of the everyday as constituted by the transactional social. But Bloch also
explains such transcendence in terms that come much closer to those of Schutz, for he
too stresses that people cannot perceive roles and groups directly. Instead, they must be
products of the imagination that become socially shared and are therefore represented
to experience, rather than given to it directly.
Like Schutz, Bloch does not completely separate the transcendental from the
transactional, even as he continues to preserve its distinctiveness. As he puts it, there
‘is plenty of transactional social in human sociality that occurs side by side or in
combination with the transcendental social’, and people may ‘use the existence of the
transcendental social as one of the many counters used in the transactional game’
(2008: 2056). To illustrate this point, and his argument more generally, Bloch discusses
a Malagasy village elder he has known for many years. By the time Bloch writes his
essay, this elder has become very old, somewhat senile and physically weak. He spends
most days curled up in a blanket. Yet people continue to approach him with respect,
deference, and fear, and in ritual contexts they always put him in charge so that he can
bless the participants. At the same time, however, people no longer involve this man in
the transactional contexts in which they play the ‘Machiavellian game of influence’, and
in this respect they are happy to leave him out of the flow of ‘everyday’ transactional
social life (2008: 2056). He has lost most of his transactional footing, and is increasingly
treated by those around him only in his transcendent role – a last step towards finally
achieving an ancestral existence even more fully beyond the transactional world.
The everyday for Bloch is thus a realm in which people mix and/or shuttle back and
forth between transactional and transcendental conceptualizations of who they and

others are and what they and others are doing. What we tend to call the transcendent
or religious, he argues, is a realm much more solely focused on the idealized roles and
groups generated out of the imagination. So, following Bloch, part of the answer to
the question Schutz left us with, the question of what kinds of things can be found to
populate the realm of the transcendent, is that it is filled with the kinds of roles and
groups we have called social structure. But surely there must also exist other inhabitants
of the transcendent. One, I would like to suggest, is values. I do not mean to imply that
values are the only constituents of the transcendent besides idealized roles and groups,
just that they are another one that is worth examining for anthropologists of religion.
We might, in this connection, recall that values are one of the things that Das assigned
to the transcendent and thereby defined the ordinary against, and that Lambek (2010b:
61), though he has carried out important work on ethical values elsewhere (Lambek
2015a), in a second essay on ordinary ethics that is a companion to the one from
which I drew above also states explicitly that values (along with rules) are not, as he
conceives of things, part of the ‘substance’ of ethics. I want to suggest that there are
resources available in the anthropology of religion that can help us avoid such summary
judgements about values and can thereby help us round out our understanding not
only of ethics in general, but ultimately also of its ordinary varieties.
On ritual, values, and transcendence

At least in terms of throwing values into the transcendent box, I think Das has a point.
While I do not want to tarry too long with defining values in an article that is already a
bit heavy with definitional exertions, let us take values as representations of the good or
what people take to be, all things considered, desirable. That is to say, whether or not
people at every moment desire the things that values represent, people do acknowledge
in a second-order way that they are worth desiring. People know, to put it in terms
that bear more centrally on issues of ethics, that it is good to desire them, even if this
does not mean their desire for them is constant. Like roles and groups, then, people do
not always immediately experience values in their fullest form in the ordinary course
of things – sometimes during the flow of everyday life the ethical desire values are
capable of awakening is not to the fore – yet they can still, on reflection, appreciate
their desirability. This is one sense in which we can say that values at times transcend
ordinary experience.
But there is also a second reason that it makes sense to talk about values as
transcendent. In all social systems, as I have argued elsewhere, drawing on the works
of Dumont, Weber, and Berlin, values at times come into conflict with one another
(Robbins 2013). To take a case that is to hand from some recent reading, many people
who were liberal, elite university students in the United States in the late 1930s up
through 1940, having grown up in the long shadow of the First World War, felt very
strongly attached to the values of peace and justice. The question of whether the
United States should remain isolationist or join the Second World War became a
problem for them when these two values came into conflict, raising issues of when
peace could be abandoned for the sake of justice, and when it could not (Gilkey 2001:
4-10). This clash of values is quite dramatic, but we are all familiar with others that
are less so both from our own lives and from our fieldwork. In academic lectures,
I occasionally illustrate this point by reminding people of the clash of the academic
values of honesty and politeness that sometimes arises when someone asks us what we
thought of his or her presentation, or, drawing on something that used to feature in a

lot of ethnographies, I bring up the conflict people in many places regularly experience
between realizing values tied to affinity and those tied to kinship. Because conflicts
frequently beset the realization of values in everyday life in this way, I do not think we
find them worked out in very full or coherent form there. For reasons I will come back
to, we feel the conflicting pulls of values in the everyday, but mostly we muddle along
without sorting out fully what any one value really looks like or demands of us. This
may in fact be part of what Das appreciates about everyday life, and it certainly supports
her casting of ‘transcendent . . . values’ out of it.2 But if conflicts between values mean
we do not usually experience the full force of any one of them in the course of ordinary
living, where in our experience do we encounter that force? Here I want to follow Bloch
and suggest that one place we find it is in the transcendent as that comes to us through
our participation in the realm of religion.
I have recently made an argument about values that is close to the one I am making
here and that suggests that one place people find clearly articulated versions of single
values is in ritual (Robbins 2015a).3 Since developing that argument, I have discovered
that Victor Turner had made a very similar one in his classic essay ‘Symbols in Ndembu
ritual’ (1967b). Here I want to lay out his way of constructing the argument, as I think
it stays more neatly within anthropological boundaries than my own previous one, and
also because I can flesh it out, as he does, with his rich Ndembu ethnography.
The ritual upon which Turner focuses in his article is the Nkang’a, the ‘girl’s puberty
ritual’ of the Ndembu of northwestern Zambia (1967b: 20). Like all Ndembu rituals,
Nkang’a has a dominant, or what the Ndembu call a ‘senior’, symbol (1967b: 20).
Dominant symbols in Ndembu ritual are usually trees, and for Nkang’a the tree in
question is the mudyi tree, at the base of which the novice lies, wrapped in a blanket.
When the light bark of this tree is scratched, it exudes a milky white latex, and the
Ndembu regard this as its key characteristic, leading Turner to refer to it as the ‘milk
tree’ (1967b: 20). The matrilineal Ndembu build on this feature of the tree to interpret
it as symbolizing breast milk, breasts more generally, bonds between mothers and
children, matriliny, tribal custom, and, finally, ‘at its highest level of abstraction . . . the
unity and continuity of Ndembu society’ (1967b: 21). When Turner asked Ndembu to
tell him the meaning of the tree and the rite in which it plays a central role, these were
the answers they gave him.
Focused as they are on social structural categories, from the family to the matrilineal
clan and ultimately Ndembu society as a whole, Ndembu discussions of the Nkang’a
clearly dwell on categories belonging to what Bloch would call the transcendental social.
But, Turner tells us, in conversations on the ritual the Ndebmu are also talking about
values – aspects of their social life, such as corporate belonging (1967b: 23), that they find
desirable. As he puts it, regardless of whatever practical ends a ritual may aim at, such
as turning a girl into a marriageable woman, the dominant symbols at the centre of the
rite may be regarded as ‘ends in themselves, as representative of the axiomatic values of
the widest Ndembu society’ (1967b: 32). Drawing on a further aspect of his argument, we
might even suggest that it is rituals which ‘create’ these values, or at least lend them the
desirable quality that makes them more than inert ideals. This is where it is important
to recall Turner’s once famous argument that major symbols have both a sensory
pole – one that refers to experience-near, or, in Schutz’s terms, directly perceptible,
‘natural and physiological phenomena and processes’ – and an ideological pole that
refers to core social values (1967b: 28). Part of what ritual does, on Turner’s account,
is to attach the strong positive associations of important immediate experiences like

breast-feeding to abstract, transcendental values like matriliny and the unity of social
groups (1967b: 21, 29-30). By deploying symbols that affect such a transfer between the
sensory and the ideological, ritual becomes ‘precisely a mechanism that periodically
converts the obligatory into the desirable’ (1967b: 30). Here, then, is an account of ritual
that focuses on its ability to present participants with clearly articulated representations
of transcendental ideals of great importance for the societies in which they live and to
render those ideals desirable in ways that turn them into values.
But why do people need to ‘leap’ out of everyday life in order to encounter such
values? Why is it difficult, if not impossible, for them to find experiences of them in the
everyday? Why, to refer back to Schutz, do values belong to the great transcendencies,
rather than to those little and medium transcendencies that can be easily accessed from
within ordinary life? Turner has an answer to this question which dovetails nicely with
the very brief argument I made above that value conflicts render the appearance of
values in the everyday mostly partial and compromised.
Characteristically, Turner addresses this issue by way of some subtle ethnographic
observations. The Ndembu are matrilineal and virilocal: mothers and children live in
their husband’s and father’s villages, but they inherit their land and social status from
their mother’s or grandmother’s group. Ndembu life is thus subject to all the tensions
that are well known to beset what Lévi-Strauss (1969: 215), in an apt phrase, used to call
‘disharmonic regimes’. There are predictable tensions, for example, between men and
women, mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, and mother’s brother’s and sister’s
sons. Values attaching to different relationships are often ‘incompatible’, and people
‘who observe one set of norms find that this very observance makes them transgress
equally valid rules belonging to another set’ (Turner 1967a: 4). Turner’s genius shows in
his recognition that even as Ndembu people, when they tell him about Nkang’a, mention
only the core values of various kinds of corporate unity that it upholds through the
symbolism of the milk tree, by ritual design they practise the rite in ways that give
expression to many of the tensions that compromise the realization of these values in
daily life. For example, as women dance around the tree and the novice lying at its base,
they dramatize opposition to men by taunting them and preventing them from joining
most parts of the dance (1967b: 23). In being enacted for a single novice, the rite also
opposes her to other girls, and to the group of adult women she is about to join, who
are represented during the rite as making her suffer (1967b: 23). So too, the novice’s
mother is opposed to the group of adult women, who prevent her from dancing around
the tree. This, Turner notes, represents ‘the conflict between the matricentric family
and the wider society . . . articulated by matriliny’ (1967b: 24). And in Turner’s essay,
the list of enacted conflicts goes on (1967b: 24-5). In practice, the ritual exhibits in clear
form the kinds of everyday value conflicts that beset ordinary Ndembu life.
As Turner interprets this fact, it does not invalidate the statements Ndembu routinely
make that the tree and the ritual that takes place around it express the values of various
kinds of group solidarity. Rather, he proffers, these values are central to the rite and
the enacted conflicts only serve to stress their importance. This is so because in rituals
such as Nkang’a the ‘raw energies of conflict are domesticated into the service of social
order’ (1967b: 39). Now, this is a common Manchester School kind of claim, and I am
not sure precisely how Turner argues for it here (it does not, for example, in any way
follow directly from his argument about the polar qualities of symbols, upon which he
based his claim that ritual makes values desirable). But I think he is on to something
none the less. I would argue that the ritual has this effect precisely by suggesting that the

dominant symbol does not itself represent the conflicts enacted around it, but rather
actively overcomes them in the process of rendering clear expressions of ‘norms and
values in their abstract purity’ (1967b: 38). It is as if ritual dramatizes in its unfolding
the transcendental imperviousness of values to the evanescent, changeable, sometimes
conflicted qualities of the everyday to which Bloch drew our attention. It does so by
first giving vivid expression to everyday value conflicts, but then, in the course of its
progression, ‘demonstrating’ that it is possible to realize a single value or, as Turner
puts it, ‘closely, and on the whole harmoniously, interrelated’ values, on their own, in
something approaching their transcendental form (1967b: 40).
I can perhaps make this last point more clearly by turning briefly to an example of a
ritual drawn from my own fieldwork among the Urapmin of the West Sepik province of
Papua New Guinea. During the period of my fieldwork in the early 1990s, the Urapmin
were relatively recent converts to a charismatic form of Christianity. By the time I
arrived in Urapmin, everyone in the community had converted and Christianity was
at the centre of much of people’s public and private lives. As I have discussed in detail
elsewhere (Robbins 2004), in Urapmin, Christian morality has come into conflict with
a tradition of Urapmin moral thinking in which aggressive, self-interested behaviour
they call ‘wilful’ is valued to some extent, provided it is balanced by what they define
as ‘lawful’ behaviour orientated towards the legitimate expectations and demands of
others. Even after conversion, the conduct of much of Urapmin social life continues
to demand both wilful and lawful behaviour. This demand is rendered problematic,
however, by the fact that Urapmin Christian morality defines all wilful feelings and
actions as sinful, and it enjoins people only to experience and act on lawful thoughts
and feelings if they want to be saved. The goal of Urapmin Christians is therefore to
cultivate an ‘easy’ or ‘quiet’ heart filled with ‘good thinking’ that will lead them to live
a lawful ‘Christian life’ (Robbins 2004).
Given that traditional and Christian morality conflict in Urapmin, and that people
there still need to rely on traditional patterns of moral action in key stretches of
everyday life, their lives are marked by a conflict between the values of wilfulness and
lawfulness. Everyday life, in particular, rarely provides a setting in which Urapmin feel
they have resolved this conflict, and this leads them to define themselves as deeply sinful
people. But in their Christian rituals, they regularly do endeavour to create images of
uncompromised lawfulness and to perform such lawfulness for themselves. To illustrate
this point, I want to consider just one of their Christian rituals, the Sunday morning
church service.4
Urapmin attend church services quite frequently, sometimes even twice daily. Of all
services, however, those on Sunday morning are the most well attended and are treated
as important community-wide events. For this reason, I will focus on the Sunday
morning service, though my analysis of the way the service aims to realize the value of
lawfulness would fit other services as well.
As with the Ndembu Nkanga rite, the Urapmin Sunday service, even as it aims at
realizing the value of lawfulness, also allows for, and gives ritual expression to, the value
of wilfulness. It cannot escape doing this, I will suggest, because its overall temporal
structure is constructed so as to enact the lawful overcoming of the will. It must therefore
display wilfulness in its very design. We can see this theme at work even in the way
Urapmin understand the process by which people come to participate in the rite. In
order to take part in the Sunday service, people must come, as the Urapmin put it,
‘inside the church’. The inside/outside opposition is an important one for Urapmin

Christianity. It is ‘inside the church’, or, as they sometimes say, ‘inside God’s fence’ (like
penned pigs prevented from destroying human gardens) or ‘inside the Christian life’,
that people are best able to maintain easy hearts and practise lawfulness. As soon as
people ‘go outside’ the church or ‘jump the fence’ of Christian life, they enter a world
in which it is very difficult not to sin.
Given this understanding of the inside/outside opposition, we can interpret what
Urapmin mean by coming ‘inside the church’ as leaving the everyday and its value
conflicts behind. Glossed in this way, it should not come as a surprise that Urapmin do
not always find it easy to enter the church. Services begin when the pastor rings the bell
to call people to church. There are always a few people who respond quickly to the bell,
come inside the church, and begin to sing hymns. But most Sunday mornings many
other people feel too caught up in matters of the outside to make a quick break from it
when they hear the bell. They dawdle over eating, dressing up, finishing conversations, or
other matters that anchor them in the everyday. This difference in response ensures that
almost all church services begin with a confrontation between lawfulness, as evidenced
by the behaviour of the pastor (in church before anyone else) and the early responders
to his call, and those who straggle in late. Those already in attendance grumble about
the wilfulness of the latecomers and charge them with ‘wasting time for church’. Their
complaining counts as wilful in itself while at the same time highlighting the wilfulness
of those who have arrived late or who have not yet arrived at all. By means of this
regularly repeated scenario, even the process of beginning a service unfolds as a struggle
between lawfulness and wilfulness.
Once everyone has come inside, marking a first victory for lawful comportment, the
service proper begins with a prayer, offered by someone nominated by the pastor. These
prayers inevitably include statements about human wilfulness and the way it pushes
people to sin and then describes the purpose of the church service as allowing people to
receive God’s word in their heart, so that they can become lawful. The opening prayer is
followed by hymn singing and then a period given over to speeches by local politicians
known as big men. These speeches often take up ‘outside’ matters, such as disputes or the
difficulties facing one or other major collective project, and the discussions they initiate
are often marked by wilfulness and anger. Thus they represent another expression of
wilfulness in the midst of the church service.
But once the speeches and the discussion around them are finished and someone
has offered another prayer, the pastor begins his sermon. Sermons are at the centre of
Urapmin church services, and they mark the moment during the rite at which wilfulness
begins to be definitively overcome. As the prayer before the sermon is spoken, attention
shifts to the pulpit at the front of the church – the part of the church most identified
with lawfulness, for only those known to be free of recent wilful sins can preach or sit as
deacons on the raised platform upon which the pulpit resets. Like the opening prayer,
Urapmin sermons always in one way or another dwell on the importance of lawfulness
and the suppression of the will. More than this, they often explicitly address the way in
which listening to the sermon in the correct manner itself counts as lawful behaviour,
while poor attention is itself wilful. Here is an example of explicit preaching on this
issue taken from a Sunday sermon:
You come inside and you look at each other, you look over to your friend, he looks back at his friend,
you move your head around, turn your head from side to side. If you do that, if you are making noise,
you won’t be able to receive God’s talk. God’s talk will not be bound (get stuck) in your heart . . . Just
come in quietly and sit down and whatever kind of man is giving talk or news, you think about it and

you be peaceful. Then he [Jesus] will come and take you. You Christian people, you yourselves will
get heaven, God’s kingdom (Robbins 2004: 265-6).
Both in representational content and in the nature of its correct audition, then, the
sermon portion of the service focuses on the value of lawfulness.
The sermon is sometimes followed by a period in which various members of the
congregation ‘support’ its message by reiterating what the pastor has said about the
need for lawfulness and its link to salvation. Then there comes a final prayer. This
prayer is distinguished from all others in the service by the fact that after a prayer
leader chosen by the pastor begins it, everyone in the congregation prays loudly at the
same time, creating a cacophonous roar of simultaneous voices that eventually falls
away, leaving the prayer leader alone to conclude by naming each of the families in
attendance and asking one by one that God bless them all. People then stand up and
begin milling around the church and shaking hands, an important lawful gesture in
Urapmin life generally (Robbins 2012b). This final act of the rite can last a long time,
for each person is careful to shake the hand of everyone else in attendance. The mood
during this time is notably ‘light’ and relaxed – it has about it something of Durkheim’s
ritual effervescence.
The hand-shaking has this effervescent quality, which the service mostly lacks until
this point, because, I would suggest, this is the moment in the rite when lawfulness
has finally come to full expression. It is when people realize the value of lawfulness
in its fullest form as something they themselves are capable of realizing in their
own performance. Indeed, I would extend this point by suggesting that Durkheimian
effervescence is precisely what it feels like to realize a value fully – to realize something
transcendent in its transcendent form, rather than in the piecemeal, often compromised
forms in which ones realizes values, if one realizes them at all, in ordinary life. As it
happens, Durkheim comes pretty close to making this argument himself, and in doing
so he takes up some issues not too far removed from those that concerned Marett in
the works on ethics and religion that I mentioned at the outset. In order to consider
how Durkheim does so, I turn to a short concluding section where the main issue I
want to take up is how this foray into the transcendent realm as it appears through
the window of religion might inform our consideration of ethics even in its ordinary,
everyday forms.
Conclusion: back to ordinary ethics

Just before Turner tells us how rituals make values an object of desire for their
participants, he notes that ‘Durkheim was fascinated by the problem of why many social
norms and imperatives were felt to be at the same time “obligatory” and “desirable”’
(1967b: 30). Unfortunately, he does not reference any particular works of Durkheim at
this point, and in previous readings of his essay I thought he was making a very general
point about Durkheim, one that I found plausible but that did not really feature in
my own core reading of the great sociologist. More recently, however, I have come to
realize that Turner must have been referring to a specific essay of Durkheim’s: his 1906
piece ‘The determination of moral facts’ (Durkheim 1974; see also Karsenti 2012 for an
important reading of this text).5 It is here that Durkheim takes issue with Kant in a
way that is crucial for our understanding of his approach to ethics. Against a Kantian
emphasis on the demandingness of moral norms, he argues that moral ends cannot
be merely a matter of duty or obligation; they must also be ‘desirable and desired’

(Durkheim 1974: 45). If they were not desirable, Durkheim asserts, no one would act on
them. A sense of duty alone is not enough to mobilize human action. The desirability
of values, Durkheim goes on to suggest, is produced by experiences of the sacred,
and therefore of society and of collective sentiments that transcend the individual.
Soon we are in the territory of Durkheim’s famous later argument about the ritual
production of effervescence and its role in rendering society something people feel is
greater than, even better than, themselves. In this essay, though, the key point is that the
socially derived power of the sacred makes values themselves, rather than society more
generally, an object of desire. To this account of how the unusual, uplifting energy of
collective sociality creates such desirability, I have added the suggestion that the ways
ritual allows people to touch transcendent values in their fullest forms – to perform
those values for themselves and see the shape of their complete realization – enables the
desirability of single values to gain a hold on people that it can rarely manage to secure in
everyday life.
But, and this is where I want to bring my argument to rest, even in the course
of everyday life, some of the desirability of values that is produced in transcendent
encounters with them must surely still be felt.6 In the everyday, for reasons we have
discussed, persons rarely attempt to realize single value-linked desires fully. But the
pushes and pulls that different values exert give everyday life much of its sense of
forward movement, or at least of ethical potential. Although Das (2012: 138) holds out
some hope of making habit central to everyday moral accomplishment, she, and even
more so Lambek (2015a) and Laidlaw (2014: 198-9), sees some kind of reflection as a
key component of ordinary ethics. What I have hoped to indicate here at the end of
my argument is that it is the sometimes insistent but often rather more gentle ethical
desires various values set in play in the everyday that tip us into reflection and drive the
evaluative impulses that saturate ordinary life. Ultimately, these desires and the moral
energies they produce have their roots in the sometimes but not always friendlier face
of transcendence I have tried to bring into view here, but their forces are felt far from
the transcendent realms in which they are produced. Without moving theoretical work
on religion into the centre of the anthropological study of ethics, this is a crucial aspect
of ethical life I think we are likely to miss.
NOTES
This article was delivered as the 2015 Marett Memorial Lecture at Exeter College, Oxford. I thank Marcus
Banks for the invitation to deliver the lecture and I thank him and Exeter College for their generosity in
hosting me. I am grateful to many members of the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology at Oxford for
their feedback on the lecture. An earlier version was delivered as the Presidential Lecture at the 2015 Meeting
of the Society for the Anthropology of Religion. I also thank many of those in attendance at that meeting for
their comments. Rupert Stasch, Maurice Bloch, and Jon Bialecki read early drafts, and I thank them, along
with five very helpful anonymous JRAI reviewers, for their comments, while retaining all responsibility for
the errors that remain.
1 As implied in the text, Lambek’s references to ritual theory are only an apparent exception to this point.
His interest is in Rappaport’s performative theory of ritual, which, in an essay that is a companion to the one
I am discussing here, he rightly relates immediately back to Austin and then to ordinary language philosophy
(Lambek 2010b: 41). Ritual, in the sense in which Lambek uses it in this context, then becomes a quality
of ‘virtually all speaking’ (2010b: 48, see also 54), and he does not attend to any qualities of ritual that he
identifies as specifically religious.
2 It is also possible to argue that everyday life has the qualities it often does because within it people strive
to realize a value of interactional flow unbroken by various kinds of transactional disfluencies (see, e.g.,
Garfinkel 1967). The importance of this value for actors in everyday life encourages them to background
various value conflicts that arise, settling for value compromises where in transcendent contexts they might

not do so. If this analysis is correct, it indicates one way in which the everyday and ordinary themselves are
not as effortlessly ‘immanent’ and beyond values as they are sometimes represented to be.
3 Two of the reviewers of this article raise the question of whether in this sentence and the one just above
it I am implying that in any given social formation there will be a transcendent realm where the relationship
between values is entirely coherent. I do not mean to suggest this. I have elsewhere discussed the fact that all
religious traditions that I know of feature more than one kind of ritual and that often the different rituals in
a tradition work to realize different values (Robbins 2014a; 2014b). It is the transcendent modelling of single
values, particularly in ritual, that I am concerned with here, not the ways relationships between different
values are worked out in various social formations (an issue I take up in Robbins 2013).
4 I have considered another Urapmin Christian ritual from a similar point of view in Robbins (2015a). The
kind of ethnographic material on the church service I present here is gone over in much greater detail elsewhere
(see Robbins 2004: 255-8), though some of the analytic emphases are slightly different in this account.
5 I thank Frédéric Keck for pointing me to the relevance of this piece by Durkheim for my work more
generally, and to Karsenti’s excellent discussion of it.

6 At this point, my argument joins a number of important recent attempts to explore the relationship
between ordinary ethics and other types of ethics or morality (Clarke 2014; Keane 2014; 2015; Parkin
forthcoming). Each of these authors shapes up his argument in his own terms, and all of them do so in
terms different than the ones I use here, but I think it makes sense to see them as part of a related theoretical
discussion.
La transcendance pose-t-elle problème ? De la place de la religion dans la

nouvelle anthropologie de l’éthique
Résumé
L’anthropologie de l’éthique, en rapide développement, semble se concentrer principalement sur l’éthique
« ordinaire », ou « quotidienne ». Le présent article avance que cette focale tend à marginaliser l’étude
des apports de la religion à la vie morale des gens. Après avoir défini religion et transcendance en des
termes qui les rendent moins étrangères à l’étude de l’éthique que ne le suggèrent de nombreux partisans
de l’éthique ordinaire, l’auteur examine les valeurs comme une forme culturelle parfois transcendante, qui
éclaire souvent l’éthique. Il invoque Victor Turner (et Durkheim) pour retracer la manière dont les rituels
présentent à leurs participants des versions transcendantes des valeurs et leur permettent de les mettre en
actes. Ces rencontres modèlent à leur tour la sensibilité éthique des individus, y compris celle qui est à
l’œuvre dans la vie quotidienne, d’une manière que l’on ne peut comprendre qu’en concédant à la religion
un rôle plus central que celui qu’elle a occupé jusqu’ici dans l’anthropologie de l’éthique. L’auteur illustre
ses arguments avec des matériaux issus de l’ethnographie des Ndembu de Turner, ainsi que de ses propres
recherches sur le christianisme en Papouasie-Nouvelle-Guinée.
Joel Robbins is Sigrid Rausing Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. His work
focuses on the anthropology of religion, values and ethics, and cultural change. He is the author of the book
Becoming sinners: Christianity and moral torment in a Papua New Guinea society (University of California
Press, 2004).
Division of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge, Free School Lane, Cambridge CB2 3RF, UK.
jr626@cam.ac.uk
Comment
Michael Lambek University of Toronto Scarborough
Joel Robbins addresses an important question, namely what motivates people. He

proposes to do so by relating religion and ethics, but frames, and thereby downplays,
his positive claims within a critique of so-called ‘ordinary ethics’. Robbins pronounces

‘the anthropology of ethics’ to be ‘something like a key trend in the contemporary

discipline’ (p. 2) and one that serves to cross-cut subdisciplinary and regional interests.
Nevertheless, he worries that the very position that he describes as central to the
movement is actually a threat to the openness of the field. It is depicted as blind to ‘the
contribution of religion, or of the transcendent, to ethics’ (p. 3). As one of the people
identified with this position, I want to respond to what I see as some misconceptions. I
hope I can do so respectfully.
In asking (or showing) how the necessary is transformed into the desirable, Victor
Turner was certainly addressing a question about ethics, and Robbins is correct and
helpful in showing both how this was in line with Durkheim and how Durkheim was
developing Kantian ideas: that is, exploring how a Kantian model of ethics might actually
work outside the realm of speculative philosophy and within the world of social life.
Turner, of course, went further in acknowledging clashing values and competing social
interests and elaborating a functionalist argument concerning the way ritual resolves
conflict as part of a longer temporal process of social adjustment.1 All of this falls largely
within a Kantian tradition of ethics, yet there are other traditions and other ways of
conceiving the ethical. Kantianism starts with rule (the ‘obligatory’ for Durkheim, the
‘necessary’ for Turner, and, apparently, ‘values’ for Robbins). But for James Laidlaw
(2002; 2014) the central concept of ethics is freedom and for me it is (the exercise
of) judgement, in the sense of discernment (Lambek 2010b; 2015b). In fact, none of
these depictions alone are sufficient to capture the complex life-worlds of humans and
each sheds light on different aspects of what are ultimately the same kinds of human
problems and concerns: how to live in the world; how to act; how to live and act with
(and as) others; how to make and maintain commitments and how to balance or diverge
from them; how to know with certainty; how to partition scepticism; how to go forward
with care, hope, and enthusiasm; how to get through sorrow and experience joy. The list
could go on and would get more precise as we closed in on particular cultural worlds.
Robbins argues more generally that the position he calls ‘ordinary ethics’ ignores,
indeed obscures, religion. It could also be criticized for ignoring law, education, politics,
and so forth. That is because the project or outlook he calls ordinary ethics (I am
uneasy how quickly a book title [Lambek 2010c] has become a label!) was not designed
to carve out discrete institutions. It was not engaged in what some have called an
exercise in domaining (McKinnon & Cannell 2013). It was not trying to create a
social object (let alone a subfield), argue about insides and outsides, or about relations
between objects.2 What was of indirect polemical attention in Ordinary ethics (Lambek
2010c) was the objectification of ethics as a field, a means of control, and a subject
of expertise, particularly as exemplified in bioethics, professional ethics, ethics review
boards, and so forth. We began by saying that ethical work happens at much more
diffuse and tacit levels and not only in the terms set by the audit culture or with
respect to what have been discursively produced as large, specific, and public ethical
‘problems’, like capital punishment, corruption, and so forth; what Michael Banner
(2014), in his support – as a theologian – for the position, has called ‘hard cases’. We
did not ‘discard’ the explicit, the known, values, or rules but tried to redress a perceived
imbalance.3
It is correct that religion was not immediately in the line of vision of our first essays,
but that is hardly to say that we think it is irrelevant.4 At the same time, it is not
exactly obvious what it is Robbins accuses us of ignoring. At various times he refers to
religion, the transcendent, and ritual. It is not clear how closely he wants to identify

them with one another, but it is apparent that he treats their meaning and existence
as self-evident. Yet we know, at least since Talal Asad’s (1993) trenchant critique, that
‘religion’ is not self-evident. Are the life-cycle rituals and therapeutic endeavours of the
Ndembu, subsisting on the outskirts of the Luunda empire and within the fringes of
the British one when they were observed by Turner, to be described as ‘religion’? Were
the processes they addressed to be understood as transcendent or as immanent to their
lives? In considering, as I think Robbins rightly does, the moments of transcendence
of the everyday that some rituals afford (although Turner spoke of it as the liminal –
a state of inbetweenness rather than a Christian-like over-and-aboveness), it is all too
easy to conflate transcendence in this sense with the notion of transcendent beings,
beings that in an earlier, less sophisticated, but also possibly less overtly Christian-
influenced anthropology, were called ‘supernatural’. It is the equation of transcendence
in these two senses that leads to an ‘obvious’ identification of ‘religion’. Robbins also
refers to Maurice Bloch, but Bloch’s use of ‘transcendental’ (which he contrasts with
‘transactional’) is different again from both these uses and he does not equate it with
‘religion’. Finally, it is doubtful whether transcendence should be objectified or seen as
directly opposed to immanence rather than relative to it or in continuous dialectical
relation with it (Lambek 2013a). Instead, we might recognize, as Simmel (2010 [1918])
memorably put it, that transcendence is immanent to life.5
Drawing from Turner and Bloch, Robbins makes an interesting argument about the
trajectory of rituals, about the movement ritual makes or takes. Here he goes beyond
Arnold van Gennep’s rather static tripartite model, so beautifully elaborated by Turner,
to a more dynamic one that could be considered along the lines Aristotle called plot.
Aristotle identified an ideal formal model of plot, which has been characteristic of
much drama and fiction since and possibly of certain rituals (and was also borrowed
by Turner [1974] to describe the unfolding of social life), but which is by no means
universal, as Alton Becker (1979) demonstrated in his important account of Javanese
shadow theatre. There is likewise no reason why all the formal acts that we place under
the name of ritual should follow the same plot.6 Many rituals are simply boring to sit
through, hence we must understand their effects or efficacy by means other than (or
additional to) the psychological. This is in accord with the line of thinking opposed to
privacy theories of meaning, from Wittgenstein through Austin, and Rappaport, but
also Ryle and Geertz.7 An appropriate criticism of my own arguments (Lambek 2010b)
might be that I emphasize illocutionary force at the expense of the perlocutionary
effects of ritual. The illocutionary places circumstances, persons, and relations under
(new) descriptions; the perlocutionary persuades people to go along with them. Turner
and Bloch do have much to contribute here, and I see the main point of Robbins’ essay
as reminding us of that fact.8
However, Bloch also makes a rather odd bedfellow for Robbins or Turner insofar as he
sees (or saw) religion (or ritual) not as supporting or underpinning ordinary ethical life
but as mystifying and undermining it by producing false values and social hierarchies.
In short, Bloch’s ceaselessly self-transcending but also powerfully consistent line of
argument has been Marxian rather than Durkheimian. Where Bloch and I have most
clearly differed is with respect to his separation of the ritual, symbolic, or religious from
the everyday, for example in his famous essay (1989 [1977]; cf. 2005) critiquing Geertz’s
cultural analysis. More recently he has transformed this opposition into a different
one between the transactional and the transcendental, in which the transcendental is
pervasive and necessary before (both logically and historically) it is exceptional and

predatory.9 This has more in common with my approach but remains constituted by
means of a conceptual divide. It is evidently Bloch who maintains the kinds of dualisms
that Robbins attributes to ordinary ethics.
I acknowledge that my thinking is subject to dualism,10 but not in the areas where
Robbins locates it. What he may not have noticed is that the structure of his own
argument – that is, his creation of dualisms which he attributes to ordinary ethics and
then with a flourish manages to transcend – takes the identical rhetorical form that
he argues is characteristic of ritual: setting up oppositions in order to transcend them
with broader values. Robbins performs on the conceptualization of ordinary ethics
exactly the kind of distortion that Bloch once argued ritual performs on the actual
everyday.
As Robbins acknowledges in his first endnote, I do see ritual as highly relevant,
indeed intrinsic, to ethical life. But I see ritual in the first instance as the property
or dimension of marked recursivity in action and with respect to the illocutionary
dimension of all utterances. Rituals, taken as a plural noun rather than adjectivally,
occur along a continuum of formality and illocutionary force, and some are embedded
in what Roy Rappaport (1999) described as liturgical orders, hierarchies of invariance,
consequentiality, authority, and certainty, or what he summarized as sanctity. The
sacred in this sense is a property that emerges from within speech and action rather
than being transcendent to them and yet at the same time it anchors them.11
Extending Rappaport’s insight, and drawing also from the profound reflections on
speaking of Stanley Cavell (e.g. 1996), the ethical is not only an objectified product of
discourse (as reasons or justifications), as some linguistic anthropologists would have it.
It is also – and first – intrinsic to the very act of discourse, that is, to human interaction
and conversation (or, from another angle, human intersubjectivity). Moreover, insofar
as the illocutionary forms (like promises or apologies) are relatively stable and invariant,
and whether they are understood individually (outside ‘religion’) or as parts of liturgical
orders (intrinsic to ‘religion’), they could be described as transcendental to the everyday
in the sense of ongoing practice or practical judgement. The relationship between action
understood as (Austinian) performance and as (Aristotelian) practice is central to my
argument (Lambek 2010b).
In sum, I think that Robbins’ critique comes from a specifically Kantian perspective
on ethics, a perspective that is itself closely linked on both historical and philosophical
grounds with a certain conceptualization of religion (cf. Williams 1985). From this
perspective, his critique may be a fair one. But those of us writing about ordinary ethics
draw more from Aristotle (Lambek 2010b; 2010c; 2015b; Mattingly 2012) or Wittgenstein
(Das 2015), and, in the somewhat different cases of Laidlaw (2014) and Faubion (2011),
from Foucault and Nietzsche. Hence, on the positive side, what Robbins invites us to
think more closely or write more explicitly about is: how might the relation of the ethical
to the religious look differently from and between these alternative positions?12
Finally, to raise a practical and political issue, to link the ethical too closely to
the religious is to play into the hands of those who think that people who have not yet
received the Abrahamic religions or who refuse them (e.g. atheists) are outside the ethical
pale. It is, in effect, to join in the war against the ostensibly and the actually irreligious,
to advocate missionizing and transforming them, in order to enable them to transcend
base instincts or primitive thinking and rise to the transcendent heights of ethical life.
I am grateful to Robbins for offering me the chance to clarify my views. The shame
about this dispute is that it disguises the fact that he and I actually share much of our

intellectual horizon. I suspect we turn to ethics in large part for the same reasons, not
only to provide stronger pictures of action, as he rightly says (cf. Lambek 2015b),
but also to preserve, in our respective ways, the best of what was understood in
anthropology’s concern with ‘culture’. And both of us want to ensure that the conditions
and assumptions of the contemporary globalized, alternately alienated and hysterical,
and mass-mediated world not be taken as having characterized social experience over
most of human history.
NOTES
Thanks to Matt Candea for inviting a response and to Jackie Solway, Donna Young and Maurice Bloch for
advice. They are not to be attributed any infelicities committed here.
1 Turner’s work exceeds functionalism, and he made a series of wonderful contributions concerning
symbols, social drama, and so forth.

2 One of the contributions of Ordinary ethics (Lambek 2010c) was to emphasize the centrality of language.
3 ‘Values’ occupies an odd place in Robbins’ list. In fact, I have discussed value and values in relation to
judgement and action (Lambek 2008a; 2015a; cf. Graeber 2001; Otto & Willerslev 2013) and tried to distinguish
analytically between values and meta-values. I argue that practical judgement frequently concerns discerning
between and balancing among incommensurable values that may appear more or less explicit.
4 Several essays in Ordinary ethics explicitly address religion, notably Young (2010). See also my account
of the relation of religion to ethics in Didier Fassin’s compendium (Fassin 2012b; Lambek 2012) and James
Laidlaw’s (2013) account of the same in Boddy & Lambek (2013), to which I also contribute a chapter
on religion and language (Lambek 2013b) as well as a discussion of transcendence and immanence in the
Introduction (Lambek 2013a). For compelling accounts of religion described explicitly as immanent, see Gell
(1995), Viveiros de Castro (2012).
5 The sentence is: ‘Insofar as life’s essence goes, transcendence is immanent to it (it is not something that
might be added to its being, but instead is constitutive of its being)’ (Simmel 2010 [1918]: 9). I agree with the
position that Robbins attributes to Schutz, that ‘in itself transcendence is nothing special’ (p. 6). However, I
cannot make sense of Robbins’ claim to ‘foreground a kinder, gentler side of the transcendent’ (p. 5).
6 On the limits of liminality as the key to all ritual action, see Lambek (2007).
7 Bloch’s work on ritual, from his early accounts through his recent concerns with what he calls the
transcendental, lies firmly within this tradition as well, albeit trying to bridge it with accounts of cognition.
8 For powerful developments of the approach, see Fernandez (1982) and Kapferer (1983), who emphasize
the aesthetic dimensions of ritual movement.

9 I draw from a work of his in progress, but see also Bloch (2008).
10 Not even ‘relational non-dualism’ (Scott 2016) evades it.
11 Rappaport provides a compelling account of the way ritual establishes the sacred, demonstrates the
invariant, sanctifies social bonds and commitments, and thereby founds morality. It is an argument that,
albeit coming from a different angle, in fact anticipates what Robbins wishes to see religion do for ethics.
What Robbins calls values are brought into the hierarchical scheme as cosmological axioms and rules of
conduct (Rappaport 1999: 263-6) and as hierarchies of regulation (1999: 426). Rappaport does not ignore
transcendence (in the experiential or ‘religious’ sense) but refers to it as the numinous and, in a less developed
argument, suggests that the holy (‘religion’) is to be found in the conjunction of the sacred and the numinous.
12 For examples, see Hirschkind (2006) and Mahmood (2005).
Comment
Veena Das Johns Hopkins University
It is a privilege to respond to Joel Robbins’ Marett Lecture, in which Robbins does me the
honor of submitting some of my ideas on ordinary ethics to a close and critical scrutiny.
Robbins is concerned that in privileging everyday life, I have (along with Michael
Lambek and James Laidlaw) missed out on the importance of religious phenomena (as

distinct from using empirical data or examples from religion) in relation to the question
of ethics. Instead of refuting every point he makes, I think it might be more interesting
for Robbins and the reader if I lay out what is at stake for me in privileging the notion
of the ordinary and how a continuing engagement with Robbins helps me to clarify
some of my thoughts. Bluntly stated, Robbins and I seem to have some fundamental
disagreements, but I hope these differences are interesting enough to illuminate how
one might do anthropology in very different modes. This is related in part to the
different ways we came into the discipline of anthropology and the different ways we
strive to inherit the past.
Robbins thinks of some of the recent work on ethics as constituting a new domain
of anthropology that he names the anthropology of ethics, and which he envisages as a
subdiscipline of anthropology. In contrast, I have explicitly distanced myself from the
carving out of a separate domain of inquiry called the anthropology of ethics, as if there
was a domain of social life that we could name ‘ethics’ and then go and study it. Cora
Diamond is instructive here:
We may . . . think that there is thought and talk that has as its subject matter what the good life is
for human beings, or what principles or actions we should accept; and then philosophical ethics will
be philosophy of that area of thought and talk. But you do not have to think that; and Wittgenstein
rejects that conception of ethics . . . Just as logic is not, for Wittgenstein, a particular subject with
its own body of truths, but penetrates all thought, so ethics has no particular subject matter; rather,
an ethical sprit, an attitude to the world and life, can penetrate any world and thought . . . So the
contrast I want is that between ethics conceived as a sphere of discourse among others in contrast
with ethics tied to everything there is or can be, the world as a whole, life (2000: 153).
Robbins is, of course, free to reject this critique of naming ethics as a domain having a
subject matter of its own and take the position that the main source of ethics is to be
found in religion – this will lead him to reading the anthropological classics in one way
while I might read them in another way. For instance, consider Durkheim’s dismissive
views on women, when he asserts that, owing to their rudimentary sensibility, they
need nothing more than ‘some devotional practices and some animals to care for’ in
order to satisfy their spiritual needs (Durkheim 1951 [1897]: 215-16). I see this view as
directly related to the place he later came to assign to the sacred, which draws a line
between sacred public rituals reserved for men and a private, domestic sphere reserved
for women, who are assigned the domain of the mundane.1 Robbins values Durkheim’s
formulation for its ability to provide for the ennobling experience of religion. While
I have learned much from Durkheim on such themes as pain inscribed on the body
as the creation of future memory, I am also mindful of the series of exclusions that
will get repeated if we privilege the place of religion as a source of all morality. At
the level of actual fieldwork, Robbins’ privileging of religion as the ground on which
morality is to be found is in danger of ignoring the multiple relations of ground and
figure – it is not accidental that he finds ethics in such places as church sermons or
conversion experiences. I do not contest that these may be powerful experiences, but
they do not open up a straightforward route to ethics, for the concepts evoked in these
contexts may ring hollow, empty, or even deceitful in relation to the texture of our
lives (see Diamond 1988). An alternative way of looking at ethics would (as examples)
consist of treating modalities such as attentiveness to the other, voicing as opposed to
speech, living as if it mattered, recognizing the other (man, woman, animal) as a flesh
and blood creature, recognizing the small acts through which many defy unspeakable
horror, repair of relations, and similar small disciplines, as ethics embedded within the

routines and repetitions of everyday life – rather than in flights from the everyday (see
Lambek, Das, Keane & Fassin 2015).
A further issue for me is Robbins’ insistence on defining religion primarily
through the experience of transcendence. As counterpoints, consider Talal Asad’s (1993:
20-54) critique of the theoretical search for an essence of religion across time and
space; Alexander Piatigorsky’s (1985) critique of the Christian underpinnings of
anthropological concepts of religion; or my own work, which shows that even such
concepts as God, fundamental to Semitic religions, get mistranslated when applied to
Sanskrit texts on sacrifice or to Hindu devotional practices (Das 1983; 2008). In the case
of Sanskrit texts, gods were considered secondary and external to sacrifice (as compared
to the offering, which was seen as primary and internal; they were seen as creations of
language rather than having any independent existence of their own). In the case of
Hindu devotional practices, names of deities had an adjectival quality that could attach
to any aspect of life – proper names did not indicate a substantive existence. There is,
as everyone knows, a long tradition in Western philosophy that finds nothing of value
beyond Christianity and thus is content to think that genuine religious experience (as
distinct from emotive mythic thought) is not possible outside the more refined Christian
sensibility.2 Fortunately, Robbins does not want to privilege Christianity quite in this
manner, but he does need to consider if the equation of religions with transcendence is
not a provincial view elevated to the status of a universal truth (see also Lambek 2008b).
For reasons of space, let me briefly pick up three points which Robbins takes as
‘given’ but which are puzzles for me when I look at them from the perspective of
another tradition. I realize that he might see these as minor cogs in his argument, but
for me they are hinges that allow him to move between various points in his thesis by
conjuring certain connections that are not warranted.
As an illustration of the above claim, I take three citations from Robbins’ essay and
offer a brief commentary on each.
First citation:
It is Schutz’s phenomenological side that most interests us here, since it leads him to argue that
transcendence is inescapable in human life – for there are always things that are important to us that
are outside our immediate perceptual experience but that we can represent to ourselves by means of
various kinds of signs (p. 6).
Commentary: Robbins goes on to explicate Schutz’s notion of different levels of

transcendence, but the basic equation he makes between transcendence and imagination
of absence is simply posited rather than argued for. That there are things outside our
immediate perceptual experience was taken for granted in, say, reflections on the nature
of absence by philosophers of the grammatical school, hermeneutics, and logicians in
the Sanskritic traditions. However, it led them to think not only of signs but also of
signification without signs, on the one hand (for a discussion of signless signification,
see Pontillo & Candotti 2013), and of everyday language as containing the possibility of
fantasy through resonance, on the other. This character of everyday life as itself laced
with fantasy is a fundamental insight also offered by Wittgenstein, Cavell, and Lear,
in their reflection on the everyday (see Das 2015 for a fuller discussion). Things that
are of importance to us might well be found in the everyday itself, even if for some
this will not be sufficient, leading to disappointment and the unleashing of violence
against the everyday. In thinking of religion on other registers than the experience of
transcendence that Robbins privileges, I believe the idea of ordinary ethics opens a path

to think of ethics differently. I am not claiming anything more but not anything less
either than that we rethink the notion, implied in Robbins’ argument, that religion as
transcendence is the source of all morality – a view proposed as a given by a variety
of thinkers, ranging from Durkheim (2008 [1912], and with important modifications)
to Geertz (1973). Even if we qualify the statement and say religion is surely the source
of some moral notions, I would be mindful of the fact that the ethical in many such
cases often morphs into the unethical, as in the example of crowds intoxicated by the
power of transcendence who can be so beside themselves that they can kill and rape
with impunity during sectarian riots, while imagining that they are acting on behalf of
religious or national values.
Second citation:
[A] person would remain to a considerable extent caught within the limits of the flux of actually present
experiences . . . There would be life and lived experiences, perhaps even encounters, but no life-world’
. . . So the everyday is shot through with, even constituted in large part by, transcendence (p. 6).
Commentary: I agree that everyday life contains in itself the possibility of transcending
it – this ‘going beyond’ linked with experiences of heightened intensities can be a source
of both the ethical and the unethical. As one example of how these issues are discussed
in some of the Indian traditions, I have elsewhere dwelt at length on the interrogation
of Dharma (with a capital D) through the voices of women (Draupadi, Gandhari) in
the Mahabharata, as well as the striving for non-cruelty (rather than non-violence) as
a mode of living that the text posits as an ethics more suited to the scale of the human
and of everyday life (Das 2013).
To make a more general point: Robbins’ claim (following Schutz & Luckmann
1989: 132) that without the experience of transcendence in religion one might have a
life but not a life-world seems to rest on the idea of a life-world through the sense
of a horizon that comes prior to understanding and evaluating experience. Here my
problem is not that the issue of transcendence is not important but that it is too easily
settled in Robbins’ discussion. In contrast, consider the development of the notion
of the horizon in Heidegger, in which the traditional distinction between immanence
and transcendence is ultimately dissolved. At the simplest level, if the fact that the
certainty of death constitutes existence as being-towards-death and hence a horizon of
life, the fact of the uncertainty regarding when death will strike you makes it present in
everyday life as the here and the now. While I cannot elaborate on this point further,
it seems to me that in the work of philosophers more compelling than Schutz (I think
of Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Nāgārjuna, and Dōgen Zenji), the risk of subjectivism in
ending up with positing a transcendental subject is engaged with considerable care, such
as in Wittgenstein’s suspicion of language ‘going on holiday’ (Wittgenstein 1973 [1958]:
#38), Nāgārjuna’s demonstration that nirvān.a cannot be posited outside of samsāra
(Siderita & Katsura 2013; see also Stambaugh 1981), or Heidegger’s notion of the Other
as the ex-centric limit of Dasein – the form human existence takes (Heidegger 1962:
330-1). I confess that Robbins has forced my hand here, for though the suspicious ease
with which transcendental experience is claimed in scholarship and in life is something
that has occupied my thinking for more than two years, I take much longer to work
out these issues than do many others. I hope, however, to have given an indication
of some of the issues with which I am engaged and which indeed have something
to do with how demanding (but not scary, as Robbins assumes) it is to think of the
repositioning of the traditional oppositions of transcendental and immanent from

the perspective of ordinary ethics. Thinking through the difficulty of reality and the
difficulty of philosophy/anthropology should not be equated with ‘blind spots’.
Third citation:
The potential blind spot I am worried about is one that obscures the contribution of religion, or
of the transcendent, to ethics. Religion is not necessarily the opposite of the ordinary and everyday,
but as an exercise it is worth considering such standard antonyms to these terms as ‘extraordinary’,
‘exceptional’, and ‘unusual’, and noting that these terms all apply to the sacred and to religion more
generally. Understood as it often is in these terms, the sacred seems a notion that does not effortlessly
inhabit the world of the ordinary and the everyday (p. 3).
Commentary: Here Robbins’ argument seems to me to rely on grammatical twists.

Thus by simply stating ‘of religion, or of the transcendent’, he manages to create an
equivalence between these two terms – yet his argument as to why we should equate
religion with the transcendent is stated as ‘common sense’ that all humans have about
religion. Minimally, however, there are other ways of defining religion (e.g. dharma) that
do not draw on the transcendental as much as on everyday practices.3 While ‘common
sense’ might be evoked to create the idea that the everyday stands in opposition to the
extraordinary or the exceptional, it is Wittgenstein’s achievement to have tried to free
us from such illusions through his great insight that everyday life weaves the ordinary
and the extraordinary together. Consider, for example, his question as to whether the
ordinary has always to have the look of the ordinary (see Das 2015). One might also
point out that in the dharmashastras, which lay out rules of conduct, the opposite of the
dharma to be followed in everyday life is not a transcendent overcoming of everyday life,
but a dharma to be followed in times of distress (āpaddharma) – so the opposite of the
ordinary might be the exceptional, but conceptually the exceptional is not equivalent
to the transcendental.
Let me make a final point for Robbins’ consideration. From where I stand, there is no
special purchase that religion has for defining ethics either conceptually or experientially.
If one wishes to see society in terms of domains (and many would question this
characterization), then there is no reason to privilege religion over politics or economics.
One could ask how our ethical claims might be severely compromised by the fact that
we live in polities that condone torture yet actively practise it (Lear 2015); or one might
ask how the distribution of resources according to principles of fairness raises issues
about ethics in judging a particular society taken as a whole. There are clearly several
perspectives from which one could ask how questions of ethics arise in the weave of our
lives. The stake for ordinary ethics for me is that it makes room for a particular kind
of striving that I have characterized as a striving for the eventual everyday that must
be birthed from the actual everyday (Das 2010; 2015). It is possible that my sensibilities
are honed from the desire to make anthropology open to other traditions of thought
than those to which it habitually turns. Or it might be the case that my admiration for
those who engage the world as they find it through what I have called a descent into
the ordinary makes me privilege the place of the ordinary in our lives. I tell myself that
if Gandhi could find spiritual satisfaction in spinning and weaving and insisting on
learning how to clean toilets as part of the nationalist movement, then perhaps making
some room for an ethics of the ordinary is not so bad, after all is said and done.
NOTES
1 The exception is the role of women in piacular rituals, in which the collective is embodied in the ‘bad
sacred’.

2 There is a long tradition of complete dismissal of Indian philosophy by philosophers including Hegel,
Husserl, and more recently Levinas. I have examined this impulse elsewhere (see Das, Jackson, Kleinman &
Singh 2014), but there is room for much more work on the kind of reasoning deployed to de-legitimize the
claims of non-Western systems of thought and assign them a place as primarily mythical, which is not to say
that I would consider mythical thought itself as purely driven by emotion.
3 The difficulties of translating the term ‘dharma’ are well known for it can refer to the natural inclinations
of an entity (svabhāva), a code of conduct, or moral striving, among others. It is only in the context of
modernity that this term came to serve as a rough equivalent of religion.
Comment
Bruce Kapferer University of Bergen
Joel Robbins suggests that the current discussion among some key figures concerning
the anthropology of ethics sidelines the importance of religion and ritual in the
exploration of morality and value, although there are clear exceptions (e.g. Evens
2008). He presents a convincing case that the particular and highly influential direction
of such anthropologists as Veena Das (2007; 2012) and Michael Lambek (2010a) to the
everyday or ordinary, in their conceptualization, is in some measure responsible for the
marginalization of religion, at least in their intervention within the anthropology of
ethics. Robbins declares this to be surprising because of the intellectual backgrounds of
the scholars concerned. The answer lies, says Robbins, in their particular understanding
of the everyday and ordinary, which are defined in relation to Durkheim’s dichotomy
of the sacred and the profane. Here is where Das and Lambek become unstuck. Both
are in many ways anti-Durkheimian, yet it is Durkheim who, somewhat ironically,
determines them. That is, they implicitly accept Durkheim’s idea of transcendence as to
do with the supra-mundane and not the mundane. This leads them to an impoverished
understanding of the everyday and the ordinary. Here, if I have read Robbins correctly,
this is a telling criticism. There is no need to throw the baby out with the bathwater: the
idea of transcendence along with religion and ritual. If they had taken the orientation
of the social phenomenologist Alfred Schutz (which is far from at odds with the kind
of phenomenological orientation to which Lambek cleaves and even that of Das’s
Wittgensteinian perspective), then they would see that the idea of transcendence is a
dimension of the everyday of the various finite provinces of meaning of its multiple
realities (see also Berger & Luckmann 1966). Human beings transcend themselves in the
world, which is not necessarily inconsistent with the intention of Durkheim’s approach
but leads to an overcoming of some of its difficulties. Perhaps Robbins might have
used Schutz’s expression ‘paramount reality of everyday life’ (Schutz 1970; Schutz &
Luckmann 1989) to make his point even more strongly against what I think are the
relatively weakened approaches of Lambek and Das. The concepts of the everyday
and the ordinary, at least as Lambek and Das appear to use them, might usefully be
reconceived, as Robbins intimates. What Schutz is arguing is that the primary concern
of sociological inquiry is the world of human action per se in all its constructional
perceptual and apperceptual processes, of which religion and ritual are dimensions.
Schutz unites in its complexities what Durkheim divides.

I underscore the above because I think that Robbins might blunt his case in
another way by his dependence on Maurice Bloch’s (2013) distinction between the
transcendent social and transactional social. (Is not this a reissue of Raymond Firth’s
distinction between structure and organization?) It seems to restore the Durkheimian
sacred/profane dichotomy modified by a bit of dialectical in-out oscillation which
maintains the transcendent/mundane separation. The difference, of course, is that Bloch
has a more positive take on the mundane (in Durkheim’s view, where individualism is
destructive of sociomoral unities) as being the domain in which changes in transcendent
sociomoral value are effected to be fixed anew in the ineffable sphere of religion. Bloch
effectively repeats (and Robbins more or less acquiesces in his reference to Durkheim’s
notion of collective effervescence) Durkheim’s problematic social evolutionist and
individualist reasoning for his orientation to the potency of religion as the image and
force of society. In my view, Durkheim’s (and Bloch’s) theory of the origin of religion
and society is a ‘just so’ story bearing a close family resemblance to the legitimating
ideologies that some narratives of religion themselves present, which is not necessarily
to dispute the functions that Durkheim and Bloch attach to religion and ritual practice
but to raise questions as to how they achieve their effects in social realities. Bloch (and
Durkheim) takes a line that is contradicted by Schutz, whose social phenomenology
stresses the transcendence of human being in the world (not apart from it). Further, it
is such transcendence that is vital in humans’ constructions of their realities and in the
production and changes of the values integral to these realities.
Following Husserl, Schutz takes the existence of one individual to be premised
on the existence of others. This forms the orientational horizon of individual action.
In other words, unlike in Bloch or in Durkheim’s theories of religion, the realities
of existence are not first individual and then social but always inseparably, even if
immanently, both. The ground for the imaginal or the imaginary in Schutz is the
orientation of human beings to others as vital in the paramount reality of human
action and the constructions that flow from within it. This is different from Bloch,
where the imagination is a function of individual cognition apart from others, whereas
for Schutz it is quite the reverse. The imaginary construction of society does not come
from a positioning outside the realities of existence but from within them and as a
continuing process (without, I add, any necessary beginning or end). The imagination
is not a completely free cognitive phenomenon (à la Bloch) limited to and emergent in
the individual apart from existential realities, but is a constantly active element within
them, produced in the grounding of individuals within and their orientation towards
the realities of daily life. The imagination is endlessly implicated in the construction of
reality. The transcendent qualities of religion and ritual are open to the changing of the
values that they represent because they are vital within paramount reality not above or
independent of it. They may manifest as finite provinces of meaning, as Schutz argues,
but they are no less articulated into the matrix of lived existence and subject to the
modifications of its dynamics. Furthermore, to present or treat religion and ritual as
transcendent of the everyday (as outside daily life, rather than bracketed-off dimensions
or intensities within it) is to return to an over-determining, perhaps over-systematized,
and abstract vision of society and its moral orders for which Durkheim among many
others has been much criticized: religion and ritual as the image of society and the
hypostasis of its values integrative of the social order.
Robbins’ consideration of Victor Turner’s approach to ritual is thoroughly
appropriate to his Schutzian perspective and I think proffers a powerful extension

beyond it. However, he treats Turner as complementary to Bloch’s perspective when, in

my view, it makes Bloch’s orientation redundant, perhaps even contradictory.
Turner (1957; 1968; 1969) abandons the Durkheim sacred/profane dichotomy.
The sacred is effectively organic to the life-world, in Schutz’s sense, and ritual, as
the domain of the powers of the sacred par excellence, is thoroughly a transcendence
in the paramount reality of everyday life. Ritual is a bracketing, a finite province
of meaning, within the everyday. It is not a suspension of the everyday, as often
argued in anthropological discussions of ritual, and the creation of a space apart from
profane realities, but an intensity within it. The dramaturgical dynamic of Ndembu
rites, as Turner describes them, creates ritual as a virtuality, in the sense discussed
by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1994; see also Kapferer 1997; 2004; 2006), who
engage with Turner’s ethnography. Thus ritual involves a descent into the forces
underlying the experiences of everyday life and the constructions (representations,
typifications) through which experience (extraordinary and ordinary) is grasped,
realized, constituted, changed, or transformed. In the ritual course, participants
effectively enter within the terrain of symbolic production, into the very ground and guts
of material and substantial existence, and become agents and agencies for refashioning
and revitalizing the symbolic devices through which human beings (re)construct the
multiplicities of paramount reality.
Turner’s discussion of the generation of meaning in the ritual process – such
generation being integral to the reality (re)constituting (personal and world-making)
potencies of the symbolic – underscores his non-dualist understanding whereby
sociomoral principles and values central to the patterning of life and its experiencing
are symbolically actualized (tangibly objectified) from out of existential material being.
Turner’s polarization of the existential (the direct unmediated or embodied engagement
with life-forces) and the exegetical (the abstract conceptual, explanatory) conceives
these as moments of the continuous production and differentiation of meaning from
out of experience into objectified potent symbolic form, a dynamic that is at the heart
of the ritual process. The building of encompassing, overarching value and its symbolic
potency to re-establish or change or transform the lived circumstances and effects of
existence is through its mesh with and production from the forces of existence, from
the world – indeed the realities of everyday encounter – in its various dimensions of
import and meaning.
Ritual, for Turner, in one sense or another, is always original or re-originating in
a double sense: the materials for its symbolic work are re-potentiated anew and in a
particular social context of participants. The meanings of sociomoral import to which
ritual gives rise are articulated situationally, moulded to context as they are made
potent in their moulding of it. In this way, the heightened symbolic intensities of the
ritual process, and their situated sociomoral significances, are critical interventional
switch-points in the ongoing processes of the paramount realities of the everyday. Thus
ritual is never a static repetitive form or merely a play of representations or simply
potent as performative (illocutionary – see Rappaport 1999) acts. Ritual re-establishes
the power of its symbolic processes in situ whose sociomoral import is constantly
subject to change, accordingly having constitutive impact not imposed from on high,
as it were, but from the fact of its being drawn from within the paramount reality
of action and circumstance. This is how Turner (1967c; 1974) describes the symbolic
transitional and transformational potencies of initiation rites and the world-changing
acts of revolutionaries such as Mexico’s Hidalgo.

Turner’s movement away from Durkheimian sociology and his major revision of
conventional social anthropological approaches to rite cannot be fully grasped without
an awareness of the influence upon his thought of the idealist-materialist orientation
of Hegel and Marx as well as the psychoanalytic perspectives of Freud and Jung.
For him, the conflicts and tensions at the surface of daily life as well as those of a
personal nature (all of which ritual addresses) are born of underlying contradictions of
a sociohistorical kind (matriliny versus virilocality) tied to psycho-biological-cum-
material forces potentially of more universal import or archetypical character, as
Turner (1967c) classically discusses with reference to colour symbolism in collective
and transitional rites.
Ritual gives expression to the everyday conflicts born of underlying social
and psychological conflicts and also points up the inconsistencies and practical
impossibilities or confusions of sociocultural convention and moral rule in daily life
(the problematic of the ideal in the real). Such conflicts are ameliorated or tamed, as
Robbins notes in his appreciation of Turner, but never finally overcome precisely because
they are driven by contradictions endemic within the sociocultural and psychological
realities of human construction per se. This is a position integral to Turner’s further
development within Gluckman’s Manchester tradition, in which the vital concept of
process distinguished the tradition from more formalist and static Durkheimian and
functionalist approaches that Turner especially was breaking away from. The ritual
process is a process within the process of always already changing sociomoral realities
and that works by grappling with the contradictory forces of such change and its
differentiating and diverse effects.
The most powerful symbolic forces (those that are given sacral, transcendent value)
are those that can incorporate, totalize, the differentiations of continually shifting
and unfolding processes. These have properties of coherence and unity because of
their capacity to enfold diversity and what may be experienced as the conflictual and
inconsistent meaning of lived existence. Reality wells up and finds its connections and
continuities within them. They are open to meaning, to the becoming of meaning as
much as the expression of already established meaning. For Turner, such totalizing
symbols are motivated in their potency by contradiction often linked to fundamental
generative sensuous qualities in certain ways natural (cf. Douglas 2003) to them and
recognized across cultures. Thus Turner’s (1962) brilliant exploration of the existential
forces engaged to the colour symbol of whiteness in the Ndembu chihamba cult
advances Robbins’ argument in the context of his own Urapmin (Christian) materials.
The potency of whiteness in chihamba is likened to that of Herman Melville’s tale of
the existential struggle that unfolds in relation to the great white whale Moby-Dick.
The whiteness of the whale constitutes a totalizing symbol par excellence that embodies
the chthonic tensions and contradictions underpinning human being unfolding as well
as opening out to a host of meaningful potential that may burst beyond the cultural
historical Jewish/Christian frame from within which Melville wrote. And so Ndembu
rites such as the chihamba, for Turner, hold significance for the understanding of the
symbolic process of ritual well outside their sociohistorical specificity.
This brings me back to the anthropology of ethics, which directs Robbins’
intervention. One difficulty with the anthropology of ethics, as I see it, is a relativism,
and a Western Christian-orientated relativism at that. Prominent ethicists such as
Lambek, and echoed by Robbins here, attempt to stress the import of their enterprise
by universalizing what are to my mind highly loaded concepts such as ‘desire’ and

‘good’, which, it is claimed, morally orientate many peoples. Turner’s approach to

sociomoral formation – I admit arguably so – is less a universalism founded in a
relativism than that of some in the anthropology of ethics. Whiteness is open to different
values of sociohistorical specificity. That it has force in Christian realities is because
of dimensions of its inherent qualities as a totalizing archetypal symbol quite apart
from the historical source of its meaning in Christianity. This may be so with the terms
‘desire’, as psychoanalysts would indicate, and ‘good’, but this requires demonstration
along the lines of Turner, which, I think, has a stronger and more open project towards
the universal.
Robbins states that social anthropology is entering a period of normal science in
which the anthropology of ethics is establishing itself as a new paradigmatic orthodoxy.
This comes after a relatively long period of expansion in the discipline following
the Second World War with the breakdown of ruling methodologies and theories
and the rise of a number of innovative redirections in the discipline. A peak of
generative efflorescence was reached in social anthropology in the 1960s characterized
by considerable rivalry between different schools (as well as conflict within them), which
some anthropologists at the time described, in the words of Thomas Kuhn (1996 [1962]),
as comparable to a period of paradigm shift in the sciences. If so, Robbins shows, some
important moves in the equation, principally those of Schutz and Turner, have been
left out, to some cost if the ethical turn constitutes the growing establishment of a new
reintegrating paradigm for anthropology. Robbins indicates some doubt in this regard,
although it motivates him to suggest important methodological adjustments. For me
the real provocation, rather than ambiguity, in Robbins’ essay is his statement that the
anthropology of ethics is a return to normal science. This, given his argument and my
focus in this comment, suggests that the new orthodoxy is a reinsistence of positions
from previous orthodoxies it might well have left behind, simultaneous with a failure to
realize innovations it might well have taken on board. Turner’s practice orientation
(developed from within Max Gluckman’s [1958] situational analytic perspective –
see Evens & Handelman 2006 – which is strongly critical of normative approaches
insufficiently grounded in social action) is a case in point with reference to both Das
and Lambek, in particular. Overall, what I am saying is that, paradoxically, the ethical
turn, at least in some hands, is conservative, if not reactionary.
This may well be so in a political sense and not only methodologically. Here I note
that much of the enthusiasm for Kuhn’s approach in social science circles was that it
gave force to an anti-positivist mood at the time that was associated with resistance to
oppressive systems in the everyday worlds of North America and Western Europe and
their global imperialisms. The anthropology of ethics has also grown in a climate of
political concern in a world riven by violence and war, of continuing state oppression,
expanding inequalities, and so on. Das expresses this in her ethnography, but the work of
Didier Fassin (2012a) is perhaps the most all-embracing in this regard. Methodological
and theoretical shifts in the sciences, but more so in the social sciences, as Kuhn
indicated, are influenced by forces in larger fields of human action not confined to
the finite provinces of meaning that, as Schutz argued, routinely govern scientific or
scholarly practice in themselves. This is so certainly with the anthropology of ethics
but not unambiguously. Ethics has come to form a dominant discourse (or a discourse
of dominance even) in state, corporate, bureaucratic, and managerial realities of social
and also of scholarly control. The appeal is to widely accepted moral and humanitarian
values, but these can operate just as well in the interests of hegemony as of liberation – the

continuation of the oppression of before into the present by moral means. For me,
anthropology has always been an open plane for critical engagement of all kinds crossing
most, if not all, disciplines. The ethical turn as also a paradigmatic normalization of
the political in the sense I am referring to here may be problematic for a critical
anthropology along the lines of Robbins’ methodological provocation.
Comment
China Scherz University of Virginia
In this essay, Joel Robbins argues that a point of paradigmatic closure may be coming
that would exclude transcendence and religion from the scope of the anthropology of
ethics. As he describes it, this closure would be the outcome of the rising dominance
of the ‘ordinary’ or ‘everyday’ approach to the anthropology of ethics for which several
scholars, including Michael Lambek, have advocated. Robbins is right to want to keep
both religion and the transcendent at least partly under the broad awning that currently
shades those conversing about the ethical in anthropology, and I share his hope that it
may be possible to link the attention to the embedded ordinariness of moral striving,
success, tinkering, and failure found in the ordinary ethics literature to questions of
transcendent values, religion, and intentional projects of self making. With an eye
towards this goal, I open this comment with an attempt to clarify the differences
between Robbins and those he critiques. From there, I join Robbins to consider some
possible strategies for an approach to the anthropology of ethics that might be attentive
to both the transcendent and the everyday.
In my reading, the gap between Robbins and those he critiques is defined less by
the question of whether or not we should include religion and transcendence in the
domain of the anthropology of ethics than it is by questions related to how we should
go about engaging with those domains theoretically and ethnographically. To take one
example, Lambek and Robbins both see rituals, religious or otherwise, as ‘site[s] of
moral creation’ (Lambek 2000: 314), but differ in their view of how this occurs. For
Robbins, following Victor Turner, these ritual engagements with transcendence allow
for the transformation of the necessary into the desirable (Robbins, this volume). For
Lambek, following Roy Rappaport, rituals, and performances more broadly, establish
the conditions and criteria by which later actions can be judged. While Lambek notes
that the rituals that allow for these moments of moral creation need not be limited to
‘highly marked, decisive events’, he does not exclude religious events from consideration
(2000: 315). Although these positions differ from one another in a number of ways, the
notion that an ‘everyday’ or ‘ordinary’ approach to ethics would necessarily exclude
the religious or the transcendent, or even ‘considerations of the nature of religion as a
phenomenon’ (Robbins, p. 3), from the ‘proper subjects’ for inquiry in this area does
not strike me as a necessary outcome of this approach.
That said, different aspects of experience and theoretical resources are selected by
those focused primarily on the everyday or the ordinary and those seeking to understand
more symbolic, representational, or transcendent aspects of social life. This is not a

matter of one or the other of these approaches being ‘right’, but is instead a matter
of multiple partial views, each informed by different theoretical biases and objects of
interest. If we can give up the sterile task of deciding which partial view of reality is
the right partial view, we can instead take up the difficult work of trying to find ways
to connect them to one another. This is something I see most of the scholars working
on ethics doing in their ethnographic work, even if it is de-emphasized in their more
programmatic essays.
Robbins’ own approach neither excludes the everyday nor posits a single form
for relating the everyday and the transcendent. In an earlier essay on transcendence
(Robbins 2012c), he actually proposes that scholars of Christianity take up the
varying relations between the transcendent and the mundane in different Christian
traditions as a question for comparative inquiry. Expanding this point beyond the
study of Christianity, I suggest that we might seek to explore the possible points
and modes of intersection between the transcendent, whether religious or secular,
and the everyday within different ethico-moral assemblages. Instead of developing
a single theory, of deciding that ritual does this or that, we might instead focus
on descriptively documenting the array of possible modes of articulating these
domains.
In this same 2012 essay, Robbins (2012c: 14) also provides a somewhat more expanded
definition of what we might include within the category of the transcendent, discussing
both abstract and representational engagements with a transcendence that we will never
experience directly and the direct in-breaking of transcendent power. If such forms of
immanence can be involved in the forms of religious and transcendent experience
that Robbins wants to include under the sign of religion, then there are a great many
examples in the work of Lambek that we might wish to consider, such as his writings
on the ironic arts of living with spiritual others (Lambek 2015a).
Further, the kinds of ritual effects Robbins describes need not be divorced from
the everyday. In many cases, transcendent preoccupations and involvements also occur
within the everyday, and not only as echoes of that which occurs in institutionally
organized engagements with transcendent values. Maya Mablin’s writing on the
metaphorical and metonymic ontopraxis of mother love as a pathway towards
knowledge and experience of agape among Catholics in Brazil provides a compelling
example of this sort of everyday ritual (Mayblin 2012). While Mothering Sunday church
services acknowledge and celebrate the sacrificial values of motherhood, these values
are most fully realized and effervescently witnessed in the everyday ritual actions of an
exceptional mother celebrated for the size of her cooking pot, a pot actually tended by
her daughters, and her seemingly limitless ability to fit one more at the table (Mayblin
2012: 245).
In my own writings on a community of East African Franciscan nuns, moments
of transcendent in-breaking and mundane ritual have both been central to my
attempts to understand situations which refuse to fall to one side or another of the
transcendent/ordinary binary. Sisters participating in the difficult and never-ending
work of formation experience powerful forms of embodied intensity, attempt to
interpret it in relation to their understandings of medieval accounts of Saint Francis, and
pray that God will directly intervene in their lives to alter their experiences of their work
through grace. While some might want to focus solely on the visceral experience and
others on describing the sisters’ understandings of conversion and God’s immanence
in their lives, choosing either at the expense of the other would mean missing the ways

in which the sisters understand and experience these forms of affect in relation to both
texts and transcendence (Scherz 2015).
The transcendent, the rule, or the logos may vary in form and importance, but I agree
with Robbins that these are often present in ethics and should not be excluded from
our domain of inquiry. At the same time, an ethic is nothing if not lived in relation to
the textured specificities of experience. While Foucault’s decision to explore techniques
of the self through which one comes to relate logos to ethos (Foucault 2005; Rabinow
2003) may only solve this problem of relating the transcendent to the everyday in a
circumscribed range of cases, exploring the relations between the transcendent and the
ordinary in as broad array of sites as possible will ultimately be more productive than
attempting to choose between them.
Comment
Morgan Clarke University of Oxford
Joel Robbins’ article is a gently critical response to the suggestion by Michael Lambek
(2010a) and others that anthropologists interested in ethics study ‘ordinary ethics’.
Robbins thinks this turn to the ordinary potentially marks the end of ‘pre-paradigmatic’
‘radical openness’ (p. 2) in the new anthropology of ethics and its maturation as
normal science. He welcomes the prospect of normalization, but worries that something
important might be left out: religion. Anthropological theory of religion, he argues,
has much to offer the anthropology of ethics, not least in the purchase it offers
on the processes through which transcendental values become woven into everyday
life.
I agree wholeheartedly, although I am less sanguine as to the foreclosing of the
possibilities for an anthropology of ethics that the coming of the ‘ordinary’ might
presage. Perhaps that is because I have vested interests: much of my work concerns
people and themes that are not ordinary, at least not in the sorts of senses Lambek
(2010a: 3) suggests. Nevertheless, I very much doubt that ‘ordinary ethics’ will achieve
the status of hegemonic and distinctive research paradigm within anthropology, simply
because the categories of the ordinary and the everyday cannot bear the required
theoretical weight. In the final analysis, ordinary ethics probably reduces to ordinary
anthropology, more reversion to normal science than paradigm shift. It would be a
great shame, however, if the possibilities for a distinct anthropology of ethics were
thereby lost.
The categories of the ordinary and everyday have great rhetorical force. We think we
know what we mean when we talk about focusing on ordinary life. Or rather we know
what we don’t mean. Ordinary people are not famous, rich, and powerful. A turn to
the everyday in history meant a turn away from a history of great men and their battles
and towards social life in the round. Ordinary language philosophy meant a turn back
towards language as it is normally used as opposed to the rarefied ways it had been used
by philosophers. What would ‘ordinary ethics’ in anthropology be a turn away from?
I sense that Robbins takes it, as I do, as at least in part a move within the emergent

anthropology of ethics against what could be perceived as dangerously obvious themes,

not least the lives and works of ethical specialists such as religious virtuosi. Here I
bracket it with Samuli Schielke’s (2010) simultaneous and at least rhetorically similar
moves within the anthropology of Islam, for instance.
Lambek is actually very generous in the range of themes he proposes to embrace.
But, as Robbins says, the choice to invoke the ordinary cannot be claimed as a wholly
innocent one. And if it is not to be mere rhetoric, then it raises hard – notoriously hard
(see, e.g., Sheringham 2006) – theoretical questions. How to know the ordinary? While
clearly not wanting to be doctrinaire, and again while maintaining a catholic stance
overall, Lambek (2010a: 2-3) does offer us some suggestions, which Robbins (p. 4) takes
up: ‘ordinary’ implies an ‘ethics that is relatively tacit, grounded in agreement rather
than rule, in practice rather than knowledge or belief, and happening without calling
undue attention to itself’. And, as a consequence, religious ethics are other than this
because, ‘[t]hrough religion, the ordinary is transcended and ethics intellectualized,
materialized, or transcendentalized’.
Robbins makes some powerful comments regarding what could certainly be read
as an attempt to radically de-emphasize religious discourse and practice within an
emergent paradigm of ordinary ethics, if not exclude them altogether. My own position
is that, while I agree that in many ways religion is non-ordinary (that’s the point!), I
would strongly disagree should the consequent suggestion be that one should therefore
somehow sift out the religious from the rest of life so as better to grasp the latter.
The very distinction between the ordinary and its opposites comes to us in large part
through religion, and the relationship between them is a matter of some theological
moment and debate. To take up this genealogically religious distinction, populate its
categories in familiar ways, and then favour one set of material over the other would
thus seem to me more theology than anthropology. If the call to ordinary ethics is
for a normative focus on one sort of subject matter abstracted out of social life to the
exclusion of the rest, then it will inevitably be tendentious. We will just end up arguing
about what does and does not count, and for no good reason. We could perhaps more
profitably be thinking about how such distinctions are constituted in differing ways in
different contexts (Clarke 2014).
Much, if not all, that Lambek says makes me suspect that he would disavow such
a reading of his project. But if the summons to the ordinary is not that, then what
could it be? Here I find instructive the analogy of ordinary language philosophy
that he invokes (Lambek 2010a: 2). Again, ordinary language philosophy meant a
turn back towards language in ordinary usage. Sociocultural anthropology, with its
characteristic emphasis on participant observation and hence lived practice, could be
seen as having the complex skein of ‘everyday life’ as its normal subject matter, and
so to have anticipated the wider turn to the ordinary (Douglas 1980; Jenkins 1994).
Take the suggestion that ordinary ethics are ‘tacit’. Teasing out the implicit in other
people’s common sense has indeed been seen as the basic task of fieldwork more
generally (although the implication is, of course, not that one should therefore ignore
the explicit, even if anthropologists are always reminding each other that just reading
texts or transcribing interviews would be insufficient). ‘Wherever fieldwork is done
. . . one is listening for the unsaid’, so as to work out ‘[w]hat must be the case to get
from this point in what was said to that?’ (Dresch 2000: 122-3). But where ordinary
language philosophy was a radical call to fieldwork in a discipline that had largely
eschewed it (Austin 1956: 9), fieldwork in anthropology is normal science. ‘Ordinary

ethics’ on these grounds could certainly be a different sort of moral philosophy (or
indeed moral theology: Banner 2014), but would surely amount to anthropology as
usual.
What I fear is thus not so much that ‘ordinary ethics’ will create its own new ‘blind
spots’, as Robbins says, but that it will simply mean a return to the same old blind spots.
I very much doubt that religion will end up getting left out – there is just too much of it
around. The same also, one hopes, applies to ethical reflection, which is, surely, utterly
normal. Indeed I would consider it one of the chief advances of the new anthropology of
ethics to have been so adamant that ordinary people have ethical projects and dilemmas
too. Only some people have the means to make much of such projects, to be sure –
and those material constraints have perhaps not been paid enough attention. But, as
Robbins reminds us, a focus on the reflective aspect of ethical life, as opposed to the
collapse of ethics into habit or ‘culture’, is precisely what scholars like himself, Lambek
(2000), and James Laidlaw (2014) have contributed. It is no surprise that, as Robbins
also points out, they all work on religious traditions. But we should not thereby let
Robbins’ points about the importance of what religious theory has to offer be taken
too narrowly: transcendent values, explicit discussion of norms, and commentaries
on their conflicts are not restricted to religion, however we might imagine that
category.
That could almost go without saying. More obdurate, however, to my mind, is normal
anthropology’s impatience with talk of rules. Remember Lambek’s ‘ethics that is . . .
grounded in agreement rather than rule, in practice rather than knowledge or belief’.
Again, in the form of ‘practice theory’, this is anthropological orthodoxy: Bourdieu’s
famous discussion of the ‘fallacies of the rule’ as a mode of the objectification of culture,
and in everyday life itself ‘never . . . more than a second-best intended to make good the
occasional misfirings of the collective enterprise’ (1977: 19). Lambek, while disapproving
of Bourdieu’s unreflective notion of habitus, agrees with him here. For him, as for most
theorists of the new anthropology of ethics, it is axiomatic that morality cannot be seen
as ‘simple conformity to a set of rules’. Leaving aside the important widening of the
ethical field beyond the deontological, this, at least in part, is ‘merely to insist on the
old distinction between listening to what people claim and observing what they do’
(Lambek 2000: 318).
Surely no one ever really imagined that people always follow the rules. But if the
consequence of always wanting to look past the rules is that we lose sight of them
altogether and disregard the fascination of many societies (including our own) with what
Paul Dresch (2012) calls ‘legalism’ and I call ‘ruliness’, then it is deeply damaging. The
question as to whether culture is well conceived as a set of implicit rules is philosophically
challenging; to reduce social life to obedience to them is clearly fallacious. But the sheer
ubiquity of human use of explicit rules is nevertheless incontestable. Not every ethical
tradition is as ‘ruly’ as the one I work on (the Islamic sharia), for sure. But the use
of rules as a technology of self, as well as of society, is thoroughly banal: from dieting
and rationing one’s smoking to setting children’s bedtimes. Closer attention to the
affordances of rules as such a technology can be instructive, as I have tried to show
elsewhere (Clarke 2015). Just as theories of religion no doubt have much to offer our
theories of ethics, so too – shock, horror – does that most practical science of norms in
action, the law. Robbins is owed many thanks for postponing the closure of the window
of radical openness in the anthropology of ethics: we should take the opportunity to
smuggle in as much as we can in the meantime.

Response
I am very grateful for the responses to my article ‘What is the matter with transcendence?
On the place of religion in the new anthropology of ethics’. I am honoured by the genuine
engagement they display, and cheered by the way they take the discussion further than I
was able to in my original contribution. In their breadth and diversity, they demonstrate
how vigorous the anthropological discussion around ethics has become.
In responding in turn, I hope I can avoid any suggestion of having the last word, for
it is the open-endedness of the conversation on ethics that I have wanted to preserve
from the outset. With that as background, let me start with a point of overwhelming
agreement that I also think is the most important one at issue here. At the beginning
of Michael Lambek’s very generous and productive set of comments, he notes that he
makes ‘judgement’ a ‘central concept’ of his work on ethics, while James Laidlaw focuses
on ‘freedom’ and I tend to work with the notion of ‘values’. He goes on to say that, ‘[i]n
fact, none of these depictions alone are sufficient to capture the complex life-worlds of
humans and each sheds light on different aspects of what are ultimately the same kinds of
human problems and concerns’ (p. 16). I am in full agreement with this claim, and with
the implication that we could expand it to include other anthropologists’ approaches
to ethics as well. Even more than this, I am on board with the further implication that
the more we can do to tie our different approaches together, finding ways to bring them
to bear in concert with one another in analyses of ethnographic materials, the better
chance we have of making truly original anthropological contributions to the study of
ethics. For sure, there will be judgements, in Lambek’s sense, to be made about when
various approaches really cannot work together, but these should be careful, maybe
even mournful, judgements. Our starting assumption should reflect the openness to
which Lambek gives voice here.
I tried to model such openness in my original article by returning in conclusion
to the ordinary, which, as I had said in the introduction, I think is a key notion for
thinking about the ethical. My goal was not to suggest, as Veena Das argues I do, ‘that
the main source of ethics is to be found in religion’ (p. 20). If others might read me as
implying this in the course of arguing against what I took as the drift of the articles I
was addressing by Lambek and Das – namely that some phenomena we might think
of as religious could have little contribution to make to ordinary ethical life – then
let me clarify here that I was not making any kind of argument about an exclusive
foundation of the ethical. Instead, I wanted precisely to suggest that we might enrich
our understanding of the play of the ethical across the everyday if we were alive to the
way some religious phenomena might come to have a role in it. That is to say, I hoped
I might be making a contribution to ordinary ethics by going beyond its strictures and
bringing back what I found, rather than by trying to displace or undo it.
I tried to accomplish this move of enriching the everyday by writing about values
in particular, so I should take up this topic briefly here. Lambek (n. 3) finds it ‘odd’
that I suggest that values is one of the things that gets cast out of the ordinary in
the foundational pieces I read in the original article. I do mention there (p. 4) that
it is Das, and not Lambek, who explicitly sets values out of the ordinary when she
writes that ethical work ‘is done not by orienting oneself to transcendental, agreed-
upon values but rather through the cultivation of sensibilities within the everyday’ (Das

2012: 134, original emphasis). Later I added that Lambek has in fact done work on
values elsewhere, though not in his introduction to Ordinary ethics (Lambek 2010a),
the highly influential piece with which I had been concerned. Moreover, I also noted
that he acknowledges not focusing on values in his account of ordinary ethics in his
second piece in that volume (Lambek 2010b: 61). And now one might add that in his
introduction to his recent book, in a piece called ‘The ethical condition’, which I think
is one of the single finest contributions to the anthropological discussion of ethics,
he quotes the very values-dismissing sentence from Das I have just reproduced in the
course of pointing out how close their understandings of the ordinary are to one another
(Lambek 2015b: 27).
I realize I may be coming across as a pretty fussy reader here, but it is important to
consider that in major recent pieces that again take up ordinary ethics, both Lambek
(2015b: 26) and Das (2015: 57-67) note that they do not define the ordinary. They have
their reasons for this – quite intellectually consequential ones in Das’s case – and I do
not dispute the value of proceeding this way. But when one does not define a concept,
then statements about what one excludes from it take on a weight they might not
necessarily have to bear otherwise. This is why I think it is important to discuss those
things, including values, that Lambek and Das place outside the ordinary in what China
Scherz refers to as their ‘programmatic essays’ (p. 30). It is against this background
of renegotiating significant exclusions that I want to return to considering what I was
aiming to accomplish in discussing values in my original article.
Lambek (2015a) has written very productively about values and incommensurability
outside of his key works on ordinary ethics. This topic is key to his understanding
of judgement and it has also preoccupied me in relation to ethics in other contexts
(e.g. Robbins 2007; 2012b). I also touch on incommensurability in my article under
discussion, but in that piece I am mostly interested in another aspect of values: the
way they are tied in with desires, second-order notions of desirability, motivations (as
Lambek very astutely notes), and strivings to accomplish things people feel to be good.
Values, on this understanding, work to draw people forward towards their realization.
I turned to Durkheim as a key source in laying out how values differ from obligations
and duties in this respect, reading a text of his in which he moves decisively beyond Kant
(Karsenti 2012). The good figured as values in this Durkheimian way is quite distinct
from the right (as a matter of duty, obligation, and law), as I have argued in another
productive debate with Das (Venkatesan 2015). Having made his point about the nature
of the valuable, Durkheim suggests that the desirability of values is often generated in
ritual action, a claim on which I then expand.
But, and this is what I am driving towards, my point in arguing all this is not to
suggest that therefore all ethics is founded in ritual. It is to suggest that the kinds
of desires values evoke (or in part consist of in their very nature) are in play in the
ordinary as well. This need not, in fact perhaps rarely does, take the form of people
self-consciously consulting values and making choices, and Das is right to suggest that
if values are just about this, then we may not need a notion of them in our arsenal (see
also Das 2015). Rather, values sometimes stimulate the kinds of complex judgements
that Lambek (2015d) so productively differentiates from choice, and more generally
they set up the play of feelings of love and hate, attraction and repulsion, that are so
much a part of what moves the ordinary forward.1
To see what this might amount to in our ethnography, we can turn to Das’s (2015:
107-9) very powerful rendition of the story of Manju, a mother(in-law) who takes in a

‘girl’ who abandoned her son two days into their marriage to run off with another man,
who then left her after she became pregnant. When the girl returns to sit with her infant
daughter on Manju’s steps, Manju is first furious but then takes her in, allowing her to
resume her marriage. Das, here in dialogue with Laidlaw (2014), acknowledges that one
might talk about Manju’s actions in terms of a decision taken in relation to a norm,
or even a step in an ethics of self-making, but she discards these approaches and adds
that ‘the usual paths moral theory takes with its “ought” and its “should” simply do not
suffice’ (Das 2015: 108). Instead, Das discusses Manju’s action in terms of ‘existential
pressure’ and ‘affective force’ (2015: 108), finally resolving that in acting as she did,
Manju ‘demonstrated . . . the quality of noncruelty as described in the Mahabharata’
(2015: 109). This kind of analysis brings Das onto the very terrain I hope attention to
the notion of values might help us explore without having to root ‘existential pressures’
and ‘affective forces’ in what Das in her response critically calls the ‘“common sense”
that all humans have about religion’ (p. 23). I am suggesting that some attention to
the ways people become attached to values like non-cruelty in religious contexts, or in
other contexts where they are given the kind of focused attention and elaboration I call
transcendent, would allow us enrich the masterful account of their ordinary qualities
that Das has offered us.
In Das’s (2015) article from which I have drawn this account of Manju, she gives more
room to religion in shaping the everyday than she does in the earlier article on which
I focused in my original piece. She shows how Hindu understandings of the nature of
the world are shot through the ordinary lives of those she studies in India, and suggests
that broad Christian understandings influence the ordinary ethical lives of the African
Americans in Southern California that Cheryl Mattingly (2014) studies. So perhaps our
views might begin to converge somewhat, though I recognize that none of this commits
Das to the kinds of discussions of value, ritual, and transcendence I have put in play.2
More generally, my main point has been strictly in line with the vision Lambek lays out
in his comment and Das begins to demonstrate in her 2015 piece: the ethical overflows
any one approach to its study, and we are best served by working towards ways of
keeping a number of them alive and exploring how they might be used together.
Morgan Clarke’s bracing comment contributes to the spirit of openness to which I have
just referred while making a critical point about our need to recognize that in the ethical
sensibilities of some people and groups of people, moral laws, rules, and obligations play
a crucial role. Anthropology needs ways of understanding, appreciating, and perhaps
even, to borrow a term from Das (p. 23), finding some ‘admiration’ for those who live
ethical lives in which such phenomena are important. Clarke comes to his view of what
he calls ‘ruliness’ (pp. 33, 37) from studying the Islamic tradition of sharia law. And my
own intellectual patterns are surely more set by the fact of my extensive fieldwork with
the Urapmin (Robbins 2004) – a recently converted charismatic Christian community
the members of which are deeply concerned with meeting the demands of what they
call God’s law – than they are by any deep-seated commitment to Kant. I do not think
the ethical lives of those like the Urapmin or the Lebanese people Clarke studies are less
worthy of attention than anyone else’s, and I’m old fashioned enough in anthropological
terms to think it is not our place to weigh their efforts on a scale of good and bad, or
deep and shallow, kinds of ethical systems.
Furthermore, a really robust anthropological engagement with ethics will have to be
open to the study of ethical specialists as well as ‘ordinary’ people. Such specialists have

something of a bad name in ordinary ethics circles, but surely we need to understand
them ethnographically as well. Michael Banner’s (2014) excellent point, picked up by
Lambek here, that philosophical and theological ethicists often study imagined ‘hard
cases’ and that anthropological ethics is important precisely for setting these aside and
looking to the ethical aspects of people’s real lives is a crucial one for differentiating
anthropology from philosophy in this area. But this does not mean we should not study
specialists themselves, or, as importantly, people who find ethics hard, or who confront
themselves with tough cases or demanding, elaborated codes as part of their own real
lives. People who are ‘ruly’, in Clarke’s terms, may look to those who view them only from
a distance a bit like tribes of ethical specialists, or masses in thrall to such characters.
But that is a simplistic vision of their lives. And in case one might be tempted by my
reference to Clarke’s work and my own here to think that this kind of ruliness belongs
only to ‘Abrahamic religions’, one could look, for example, at David Akin’s (2004) work
on the Kwaio of Melanesia, or James Laidlaw’s (1995) on the Jains, or perhaps even
Lambek’s work on taboo in Madagascar (2015c), to avoid falling into that trap.
One can go even further into the exploration of ruliness as a kind of ethics by looking
at Clarke’s (2015) superb recent article on the topic. In this piece, he lays out the case
for ruliness as a phenomenon and adds a critical observation that in some settings
people not only worry about elaborating and following rules, they also come to value
rules themselves as tools for ethical work (2015: 255-7). They come, that is, to feel an
attachment to and desire to have and to follow rules – kinds of feelings and attractions
that I noted above are an important part of what values are and how they work. An
orientation to rules becomes, for such people, part of their ordinary ethical concerns,
and needs to be studied as such by an anthropological approach to ethics that can fit
rules into its vision of the everyday.
I regret that my reference to a ‘kinder, gentler’ side of transcendence (p. 5) left Lambek
nonplussed. It was meant ironically – signalled by its allusion to a pet phrase of the
first George Bush. But it also fitted my general claim that phenomena that had been
partitioned from the everyday need not all be seen as scary, demanding, and alienating
from a best kind of life that can only be lived in ordinary terms. I found Schutz
‘compelling’ precisely because he offers a way to consider transcendence that roots it
in the ordinary and in our everyday, constantly deployed capacities, while still leaving
room for it to go beyond these. But after a seminar discussion of the original article,3
and then reading these responses, I realize that I have let two different models of
transcendence colour each other in my article. Schutz’s model treats transcendence
without asserting that it has a higher value than the everyday or the ordinary. In fact, as
Bruce Kapferer reminds us, if anything, Schutz privileges the everyday as ‘paramount’.
But Durkheim, and also the tradition of axial age thinking I briefly alluded to, tend to
do the opposite: valuing, or suggesting that people value, the transcendent/sacred over
the immanent/profane. I suppose I wanted to have it both ways, borrowing some of the
force of the valued transcendent (a force which I argue informs our experience of values
as matters of desire) while keeping a sense from Schutz that the transcendent is not
wholly apart from, and destructive of, the everyday. It may be possible fully to synthesize
these two models, but I realize I did not do enough in this regard in my article. Lambek’s
trouble with my ‘kinder, gentler’ phrasing makes sense in these terms, as do the efforts
many of the respondents make to conceive the ordinary and the transcendent as more
tightly linked than they read me as suggesting.

Scherz and Kapferer are most consistent in their efforts in this regard. Scherz strongly
argues that ordinary approaches and the one I am developing should be able to work
together, and that we should recognize that transcendent concerns often arise within
the ordinary, and not only as the kinds of ‘echoes’ I was tracing. I concur, and have
tried to consider something like this in an unpublished paper where I consider how
people encounter elaborated versions of values not just in ritual, but also in ordinary
interactions with exemplary persons (Robbins n.d.).
Kapferer’s piece is a tour de force of theoretical exposition that deserves to be read in
its own right rather than as just a comment on my article. Suffice it to say, in the limited
space I have left, that I understand Kapferer as saying that we not only need to tie the
transcendent more tightly to the immanent, but that we also need to do something
about this problem in theoretical terms. Reading Schutz as a profound alternative to
Durkheim, and offloading the sacred/profane distinction altogether, he might be seen
to read Turner as an antidote to my felt need to pull together the two models of
transcendence I identified above, since he finds the hierarchical model misleading to
begin with. The account of ritual and value I offer in my article is already influenced
by some of Kapferer’s (2006) arguments that he extends here (Robbins 2015a). Having
borrowed those arguments, I will need to think further about whether I would lose too
much by following this one as well and giving up strong models of the transcendent, and
whether, against Kapferer’s own claims, there would be ways of doing so while keeping
the idea of collective effervescence (which I think is important for value theory in its
own right), even if it might have to be untethered from the sacred/profane dichotomy
in which Durkheim embeds it (see Robbins 2015b for a more developed discussion
of effervescence and its relation to value). More generally, though, it is important to
register that Kapferer offers a way of thinking about the relation of ritual and ethical life
that is different from mine and that deserves greater discussion than I can give it here.
The same sense of not reckoning with these responses as fully as they deserve applies,
I fear, to all of them. I want to reaffirm my thanks for the issues they put in play and
add that I hope they will lead to further discussion in the future.
NOTES
1In this reference to love, hate, attraction and repulsion, I am drawing not only on Durkheim, but also on
Brentano (1969), who connected values and feelings in a way that has had a long afterlife in philosophical
work on this topic.
2 In footnote 28 of her 2015 piece, Das (2015: 109) misreads my account of the diasporic Jain embrace of
animal rights. Following my sources (Laidlaw 2010 and Vallely 2008), I tie this embrace precisely to a broad
transformation in world picture that entails a change in the sense of the Jain value of non-violence (Robbins
in Venkatesan 2015). This is worth noting because it bears on the ways values themselves are not singular
things, but are relationally embedded in the kinds of world pictures and forms of life that inform Das’s work.
3 I thank Khaled Furani, Shai Lavi, and Lena Salaymeh for giving me a chance to discuss the accepted
manuscript of my article in their Law and Political Thought seminar at Tel Aviv University – a discussion
critical to my thinking on the following points.
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Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 00, 1-42

Conclusion: back to ordinary ethics

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 00, 1-42

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 00, 1-42

generally, and to Karsenti’s excellent discussion of it.

La transcendance pose-t-elle problème ? De la place de la religion dans la

Joel Robbins addresses an important question, namely what motivates people. He

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 00, 1-42

‘the anthropology of ethics’ to be ‘something like a key trend in the contemporary

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 00, 1-42

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 00, 1-42

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 00, 1-42

symbols, social drama, and so forth.

the aesthetic dimensions of ritual movement.

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Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 00, 1-42

Commentary: Robbins goes on to explicate Schutz’s notion of different levels of

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 00, 1-42

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 00, 1-42

Commentary: Here Robbins’ argument seems to me to rely on grammatical twists.

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Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 00, 1-42

beyond it. However, he treats Turner as complementary to Bloch’s perspective when, in

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Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 00, 1-42

‘good’, which, it is claimed, morally orientate many peoples. Turner’s approach to

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 00, 1-42

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 00, 1-42

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 00, 1-42

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anthropology of ethics against what could be perceived as dangerously obvious themes,

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Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 00, 1-42

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 00, 1-42

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 00, 1-42

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 00, 1-42

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 00, 1-42

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 00, 1-42

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 00, 1-42

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 00, 1-42

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