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Moral Geography (moral + geography)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Humanities and Social Sciences100%

Selected Abstracts

COMMUNITY, OBLIGATION, AND FOOD: LESSONS FROM THE MORAL GEOGRAPHY OF INUIT

GEOGRAFISKA ANNALER SERIES B: HUMAN GEOGRAPHY, Issue 3 2010
Nicole Gombay
ABSTRACT. Using Inuit as an illustration, this article discusses what it means to live in community, and argues that by taking people's moral geographies into account one may understand more fully the make-up of community. The article maintains that their moral geography creates a feeling among Inuit of obligation for the other. It is this obligation that serves as the basis for community. The article theorizes about the implications of internalized mores based on obligation, and discusses how, in contrast to the concept of rights, such mores contribute to the formation and maintenance of community. The article concludes that developing a situated understanding of people's moral geographies may help to expand our comprehension of community construction and maintenance. [source]

Policing ambiguity: Muslim saints-day festivals and the moral geography of public space in Egypt

AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Issue 4 2008
SAMULI SCHIELKE
ABSTRACT In this article, I explore how the festive culture of mulids, Egyptian Muslim saints-day festivals, troubles notions of habitus, public space, and religious and civic discipline that have become hegemonic in Egypt in the past century and how state actors attempt to "civilize" mulids by subjecting them to a spectacular, representative order of spatial differentiation. I argue that habitus must be understood as a political category related to competing relationships of ideology and embodiment and that the conceptual and physical configuration of modern public space is intimately related to the bodily and moral discipline of its users. [veneration of saints, festivals, habitus, public space, state, Islam, Egypt] [source]

Keeping the Peace: A Tale of Murder and Morality in Postapartheid South Africa

POLAR: POLITICAL AND LEGAL ANTHROPOLOGY REVIEW, Issue 2 2008
Michal Ran-Rubin
This article examines a South African murder trial known as the Reeds Murders as a site for analyzing discourses of crime, race, and citizenship within the context of postapartheid South Africa. I show how concerns over public morality are represented within the juridical field, as well as how the defendants in this case deploy collective memories of state violence to challenge the court's vision of postapartheid justice. I conclude by exploring both how public fears of African youth emerge in the sentencing of the accused, and also how those fears map onto the contours of a postapartheid moral geography. [source]

Wishful sinking: Disappearing islands, climate refugees and cosmopolitan experimentation

ASIA PACIFIC VIEWPOINT, Issue 1 2010
Carol Farbotko
Abstract Disappearing islands and climate refugees have become signifiers of the scale and urgency of uneven impacts of climate change. This paper offers a critical account of how sea level rise debates reverberate around Western mythologies of island laboratories. I argue that representations of low-lying Oceania islands as experimental spaces burden these sites with providing proof of a global climate change crisis. The emergence of Tuvalu as a climate change ,canary' has inscribed its islands as a location where developed world anxieties about global climate change are articulated. As Tuvalu islands and Tuvaluan bodies become sites to concretize climate science's statistical abstractions, they can enforce an eco-colonial gaze on Tuvalu and its inhabitants. Expressions of ,wishful sinking' create a problematic moral geography in some prominent environmentalist narratives: only after they disappear are the islands useful as an absolute truth of the urgency of climate change, and thus a prompt to save the rest of the planet. [source]