The changing subjects of ethics: the example of the study of religious life

Studies of religious life in Africa have shown that religious ethics inform how people on the continent evaluate and make sense of crises, conflicts and the ever changing conditions of their lives. Also, in many classical ethnographic descriptions of African religious life, kin groups, villages, ethnic groups or communities of various sorts have been seen as engaging in collectively shared ethics. In other words, it has been assumed that the ‘subjects of ethics’ are collectivities that were most often depicted as bounded socio-cultural units striving towards social stability. Ritual performances were accordingly perceived as being conducted with the hope of instilling or reinstating social and/or cosmic order into the bodies, minds and souls of people or an entire community (cf. Durkheim Reference Durkheim1912; for a critique, see Faubion Reference Faubion2011: 11).

Yet, as studies of social change in sub-Saharan Africa demonstrate, colonial and postcolonial institutions such as missions, schools and hospitals contributed to processes of religious change. This had far-reaching consequences for the ways in which ethics were translated into and made to interact with local discourses and practices. How did these transformations affect, firstly, who is seen to be addressed by religious ethics (in our terminology: the ‘objects’ of ethics)? And, secondly, who acts as and is perceived to be the ‘subject’ of ethics?

As has been pointed out repeatedly, in postcolonial African societies, religious ethics have been crucial for people coping with situations of poverty in years of structural adjustment (Gifford Reference Gifford2004). For example, the buzz phrase ‘make a complete break with the past’ (Meyer Reference Meyer1998) indicates an important aspect of Pentecostal identity in the 1990s. It describes how a radical turn against tradition, its authorities and ways of believing became intrinsic to people's changing ethical self-positioning in marginalized sections of African societies during these years. Yet, according to a number of studies in this field, Pentecostal ethics not only launched social harmony but in many cases did just the opposite: they served as spiritual weapons for protest and as ethical counter-narratives, often demanding radical changes in spiritual and socio-political matters as well (van Dijk Reference van Dijk1992; Meyer Reference Meyer1998). Similarly, scholars have seen rituals of spirit possession as harbouring resistance or embodying the power of the marginalized (such as women in patriarchal societies or peasants resisting colonial power) in a context that otherwise does not allow for the verbal articulation of dissonant interests or dissident ethical commitments (see, for example, Comaroff Reference Comaroff1985; Boddy Reference Boddy, Ellingson and Green2002).

Besides exemplifying how social transformations are related to the formulation of new ethical claims and contestations, the study of Pentecostalism in Africa also makes clear the ways in which religious ethics are moving from the sacred space of ritual performance into the mundane domain of daily life. For instance, Pentecostalism has been interpreted as introducing new consumer and entrepreneurial-oriented Protestant ethics into African societies (Gifford Reference Gifford, Gifford, Archard, Hart and Rapport2003; Reference Gifford2004). With their gospel of prosperity, Pentecostal churches equip their members with ‘spiritual tools’ to manage the forces they feel exposed to by Western lifestyles (Meyer Reference Meyer, Meyer and Geschiere1999; van Binsbergen Reference van Binsbergen, van Binsbergen and Geschiere2005). This shows that religious ethics have the potential to transform believers into global consumers and endow them with agency to adapt to the powers of neoliberalism in ways that allow them to proactively embrace these in an entrepreneurial mode of ethics (van Dijk Reference van Dijk, Krause and Hüwelmeier2010).

These examples highlight the fact that religious ethics can have powerful effects on the lives of people by either reproducing existing hierarchies or empowering people in distress. But they also indicate that, in the history of anthropological thought, there has been a shift in ethnographies of African societies from a focus on communal to more individualized forms of ethical commitments. Yet despite their differences, they all show how ethics are translated into social practice.

Ethics, harmony and conflict: the example of the study of kinship

When Gluckman's essay was published in 1972, the social units through which he and many of his contemporaries saw conflicts arising were ethnic groups, villages and, above all, kinship, which was widely seen as the basic unit of social organization at the time. Most aspects of social life – such as the selection of marriage partners, labour organization, political functions and the distribution of services and goods – were seen as being managed through an idiom of lineages and clans (Fortes Reference Fortes1957; Reference Fortes, Radcliffe-Brown and Forde1975). In postcolonial societies, kin and families have likewise been shown to offer people support in times of crisis and in contexts of non-existent or failing state welfare services (Whyte and Whyte Reference Whyte and Whyte2004; Vaughan Reference Vaughan and Cornwall2005; Mazzucato Reference Mazzucato, Alber, van der Geest and Whyte2008). In many of these studies, family life has been described as being governed by an ethics of mutual care, support and respect. Yet, as Geschiere (Reference Geschiere2013) has stated, there is a danger of romanticizing family life in Africa. This, he argues, is highly problematic since the same social circles of intimate relationships among kin also often produce fears and anxieties, such as those related to witchcraft.

When seen in this light, it becomes clear that an analytical focus on the role of ethics in enabling harmonious relationships between kin needs to be supplemented with an awareness of the strained nature of kinship relations, which often culminates in ethical controversies between relatives, for instance when younger family members move from rural areas to towns and leave their elderly relatives without care (Livingston Reference Livingston2003; Ingstad Reference Ingstad2004; van der Geest Reference van der Geest, Alber, van der Geest and Whyte2008; Cliggett Reference Cliggett2005).

The anthropological study of ethics should thus remain critical of approaches that depict ethics as purely good and noble principles and values that inspire people and organizations in their everyday lives and foster harmony among them. Ethics can also be pressurizing, constraining and controversial, thus causing frictions between people who are otherwise connected to each other through intimate ties.

The implicitness/explicitness of ethics: the example of NGO-ization in Africa

Noticeable at present on the African continent is a reconfiguration of the public sphere that finds expression in the emergence of new actors, organizations and forms of agency that locate themselves in – and act as intermediaries in the social space between – individuality and different forms of wider sociality. This process has been described by some scholars as a reorganization of Africa's civil society and, often as a consequence of a retrenchment of the nation state, as an NGO-ization of the public space. Yet, these actors and agencies do not go uncontested. Being placed under pressure to gain legitimacy in the wider social field, many of them take recourse to explicit ethical self-positionings. This process has led to a marked diversification of ethical claims in the public sphere.

Two connected processes can be noted here: the ‘ordinarization’ and ‘extra-ordinarization’ of ethics. Ordinarization describes the normalization of the ways in which new ethical codes become ingrained in everyday sociality. This process is contingent upon the rise of new institutional contexts and formations as well as the techniques that are available for conveying, establishing and managing the ethicalization of specific concerns. Extra-ordinarization involves ethical commitments being extrapolated from the tacit-ness of people's ordinary lives and made to play a role as expressly formulated points of concern, advocacy, conflict and/or contestation. As a consequence, ethical commitments that were previously tacit and implicit in everyday practices increasingly become objects of explicit reflection, commentary, negotiation and dispute, and thus become ‘extraordinary’ in their potential and significance.

The anthropological study of ethics has recently been enriched by inquiries into the rising number of organizations and social movements in Africa that are propagating ideas on how people should achieve or lead a good, prosperous, healthy and just life (cf. Robins Reference Robins2006; Mutua Reference Mutua2009). In many cases, these organizations are supported by transnational institutions in their fight for human rights, health or human safety, and that provide the former with the information, training and financial means to found, for instance, new NGOs (Englund Reference Englund2000; Reference Englund2011). Broadly speaking, these organizations and social movements can be said to engage in processes through which ethical commitments are made both more explicit (by spelling them out publicly) and more implicit (in that they aim for a normalization of their respective ethics in people's everyday lives).

A number of these studies look at the connection between ethical claims and issues of governance. For example, certain codified discursive markers relating to ethics, such as ‘humanity’, ‘survival’ or ‘security’, have become central to transnational modes of governmentality in African politics and publics (cf. Fassin Reference Fassin2011). At the same time, in many of these studies, ‘ethics’ is used almost exclusively in the conceptual sense of a ‘discourse’ or ‘ideology’, here understood as a mode of governance pervading all aspects of life. The problem with most of these studies is that they predominantly focus on the process by which the ethical commitments promoted by new institutions are internalized and become implicit in people's lifeworlds, partially disabling reflection on and/or the critical questioning of the individual's own position. Such approaches thus run the risk of being blind to the processes through which ethics are made explicit in the first place. A rare example of the latter is Pnina Werbner's (Reference Werbner2014) study on labour unions in Botswana. Examining the case of a labour union's political success in performing a strike in 1991, Werbner shows how the discursive recourse to the ethical principles of justice, fairness and giving voice to contenders, which had long been important in the judicial practices of local courts (kgotla), became crucial for the strike's public acceptability, despite the fact that strikes are legally forbidden by Botswana's constitution. In short, her case study shows how longstanding ethical principles turned into powerful argumentative weapons once they were explicitly introduced into public debate. This process of voicing one's ethical principles in the public domain is what we call the ‘explication of ethics’.

In addition, studies like these exemplify that ethical claims can be an intricate part of – and a catalyst for – political changes in twenty-first-century Africa. Yet, in contexts like the ones mentioned above, ethics represent more than mere tools to be used for political manipulation or to attract resources. When ethical principles are made explicit in the public sphere, they can also question and decentre existing power relations, bringing about wider contestations, cleavages and societal conflicts.

The contributions in this special issue demonstrate that neither a focus on the implicitness of ethics, nor one on their explicitness, provides a full understanding of the dynamic interactions between processes of socio-cultural change and the (re)formulation of people's ethical commitments. Instead, they aim to explore the dialectics between the two. Doing so allows us to gain important insights into questions of governmentality, the emergence of new African publics, and accompanying societal conflicts.

An ethnographic approach to ethics

What are ethics? And how can they be studied ethnographically? ‘It does not harm that the notion [of the ethical] is vague,’ argues moral philosopher Bernhard Williams (Reference Williams2011: 20). Thus, for Williams, the very fluidity of the notion of the ethical is useful when trying to come to an understanding of how ethics are practised in human life. In line with this argument, as well as with Michael Lambek's notion of ‘ordinary ethics’, we suggest that even the question of what is considered, in a given time and place, to fall under the category of ‘the ethical’ (and what is seen to lie outside it) is already part of ethical discourse and practice. Given our analytical approach to ethics as ‘ideals in practice’, a certain terminological and conceptual fluidity is essential in defining such a field, in order to examine ethnographically the translation of ethical ideals into the practicalities of everyday life.

The recently intensified interest in ethics benefits from earlier scholarship on morality, which originated in the work of Émile Durkheim (Reference Durkheim1912; see also Heintz Reference Heintz2009; Howell Reference Howell1997; Zigon Reference Zigon2008). Broadly speaking, in our understanding of the difference between ‘ethics’ and ‘morality’ we follow Williams (Reference Williams2011: 10), who distinguishes the rather abstract nature of ethics from morality, which he describes as ‘a specific system with clear cut boundaries’ (ibid.). When seen in this light, the study of morality refers to specific and contextual values and meanings while ethics relate to overarching abstract principles through which people access and evaluate their own and other's actions and attitudes, such as ‘humanity’, ‘justice’ and ‘freedom’ (see also Mattingly Reference Mattingly2012). In the contributions to this special issue, these overarching principles include ‘care’ (Vigh), ‘security’ (Kirsch), ‘prestige’ (van Dijk) and ‘life as a value in and of itself’ (Bochow).

Yet, ethical considerations, demeanours and expectations should not be conceived of as cool-headed and deliberate mental operations on preferred principles or courses of action. Rather, they usually appeal to a sense of urgency. In line with this idea, Williams proposes to revive the concept of ‘virtue’ as developed in enlightenment philosophy, which refers to ‘characteristic patterns of desires and motivations’ (Williams Reference Williams2011: 10). Thus, ethics can be said to provoke strong feelings towards a particular issue or action taken. Several of our contributors attest to this. Urbanites in Botswana feel strongly about having children because they represent the continuation of life in a context of death (Bochow, this issue), for example, and drug dealers in Bissau are judged according to the ways in which they socially and emotionally provide for family members (Vigh, this issue). In this way, ethics ‘catapult’ (van Dijk Reference van Dijk, Krause and Hüwelmeier2010) people into action, after laying out potential trajectories for the manner in which ideas and imaginaries become social drivers.

In other words, in contrast to the more delimited scope of morality, ethics entail value judgements that – in principle, if not always in practice – are of a socially encompassing nature, such as the premise that all human beings deserve to be secure (Kirsch, this issue) or the idea that the poor should be helped (Dilger, this issue). This means that ethical assumptions have wider implications for how people imagine social life per se and are principally thought to be applicable to everyone irrespective of, for example, age, gender, social status or religious orientation.

It is the latter premise that also distinguishes ‘ethics’ from ‘ideology’ in the materialist tradition or from ‘discourse’ in Foucauldian approaches. Ideologies and discourses are part and parcel of social configurations characterized by marked inequalities, different forms of exploitation, and modes of governmentality in which institutionalized mental constructs (Comaroff and Comaroff Reference Comaroff and Comaroff1991) come to be perceived as ‘natural’ even by those who suffer most from being structurally subdued by them. It is true that, as we noted above, certain ethical commitments can also be supportive of exploitative conditions. Yet, when examining ethics as ideals in practice, this observation should not always or necessarily be the starting point of our analysis. Instead, we need to recognize that ethical claims are predicated on the paradigmatic idea of human equality. They are thought of as applying to everyone, even if, when put into practice, they often bring about social differentiations of one kind or another. The Protestant ethic, for example, ‘disqualifies’ people in the eyes of God if they do not work hard enough; yet the ethical premise that Christians should show their dedication to God by working hard is believed to hold true for everyone. Taking this into consideration allows us to do justice to the socially encompassing aspirations of those with certain ethical commitments, without summarily and prematurely presuming their motivations for doing so to be grounded in sectional interests.

A question needs to be raised, however, about the existence of an all-human nature, which has lately been dismissed by authors promoting the so-called ‘ontological turn’, such as Viviero de Castro (Reference Viviero de Castro2004; for a critique of the latter position, see Vigh and Sausdal Reference Vigh and Sausdal2014). Our contributors all start from the assumption that conceptualizing ethics as encompassing value judgements does not presuppose the analytical premise of the empirical existence of a universal human nature. Instead, they show that, by making ethical claims in social practice, this notion of an all-human nature is performatively brought into being.

This perspective raises interesting questions about the changing social scale of ethical claims on the African continent. Several of the contributions in this special issue therefore take account of processes of translation from one socio-cultural context to another. Thus, of particular relevance for the topic of this special issue is ethnographic work that shows how universalist ethical claims, such as human rights, are reinterpreted and transformed when translated into the socio-cultural specificities of African localities (cf. Goodale and Merry Reference Goodale and Merry2007; Merry Reference Merry2006; for Africa cf. Wilson Reference Wilson2006).

The subjects of ethics

We suggest that the anthropological study of ethics should be pursued, firstly, in the form of an ethnographic inquiry into what is emically assumed – at a particular time and place, by the people under investigation – to constitute the ‘subjects of ethics’. Are ethics considered to be located in individuals or in a given social group, whatever its specific type or characteristics? Max Weber's (Reference Weber and Weber1934) classic writings on the Protestant ethic, alongside more recent research on individuating discourses of ethical (self-)responsibilization, provide examples of the former.Footnote ³ On the other hand, if ethics are said to be nested within a particular social grouping, which collective identifications, membership categories, interaction routines and institutional logics have an influence on how the respective ethical commitments are defined and enacted? By taking account of such emic assumptions, we avoid widespread presuppositions in social theory, such as the idea that individuals are the ‘natural’ locus of ethics, as proclaimed in Aristotelian ethics, or that the subjects of ethics are characterized by some given and fixed social ‘groupness’ (cf. Brubaker Reference Brubaker2002). Instead, this approach allows the historically and culturally manifested role of ethics in the constitution of subjectivities and socialities in Africa to be determined.

Take the example of ubuntu, a term in the Nguni language cluster that came to prominence in public debates on the feasibility, conditionality and desirability of an ‘African renaissance’ (cf. Bongmba Reference Bongmba2004; Maloka Reference Maloka2001) in post-apartheid South Africa, and which has variously been interpreted to represent a world view, a philosophy, an ideology, or – most importantly for our argument here – an ethical ‘affirmation of one's humanity through recognition of an “other” in his or her uniqueness and difference’ (Eze Reference Eze2010: 190). What is at issue in these debates is not just the meanings and characteristics of ubuntu, it is also the question of who can be said to be its subjects. Some reserve this term for ‘black’ South Africans who are said to be enculturated in this form of ethical commitment by default. Others speak out in favour of a non-racialized use of this term, affirming that ubuntu can be practised by people from all sections of South African society, ‘white’ no less than ‘black’, making it the ethical foundation of an all-encompassing post-apartheid nation building.

Our contributors analyse who can be considered to be such subjects, as they emerge in a particular ethical field, by portraying self-positionings and struggles over competing claims. These subjects range from religious groups and individual religious practitioners (Bochow, this issue; Dilger, this issue), through volunteers (Kirsch, this issue) and drug dealers (Vigh, this issue) to the new professional classes (Parkin, this issue; van Dijk, this issue).

The objects of ethics

Secondly, research on ordinary ethics in Africa should pay attention to the ‘objects of ethics’: that is, to those material realities, persons, attitudes and ‘doings and sayings’ (Schatzki Reference Schatzki1996) to which its subjects, as defined above, practically direct their respective ethical commitments. This directedness can be introverted and self-referential, finding expression in, for example, ethical self-discipline or acts of mutual surveillance within a community of ethics, say a Pentecostal church. But it can also be extroverted and made valid for others as well – sometimes by force – as among hegemonic Islamist forces in West Africa. In both cases, the pertinent question concerning the objects of ethics is: who or what in particular is the practical addressee of a given ethical practice?

Coming back to ubuntu, the question of who in particular should benefit from other people's ethical commitment to it is much contested in South Africa. There is a clear understanding by many that ‘criminals’ ought not to be dealt with gently but should be exempted from the mildness and leniency usually associated with ubuntu (see Hornberger Reference Hornberger, Picard and Martin2011). Similarly, the xenophobic attacks against immigrants from other African countries in 2008 and thereafter make it clear that many who in principle feel committed to the ethical premises of ubuntu in practice do not treat everybody according to these premises. In these cases, the universalizing potential of ethics is narrowed down by excluding certain groups of people, thus transforming ethics into situational and context-specific morality in practice. However, one also finds cases where these ethical premises are applied intentionally not in a selective and exclusivist way but rather in a problematically inclusive gesture of encompassment. In a highly controversial article published some years ago, medical anthropologist Suzanne Leclerc-Madlala documented the attitudes of South African university students to unprotected sex in the era of HIV/AIDS, pointing out that some of her interlocutors provocatively ‘evoked the word ubuntu when talking about why they would want to infect others with the virus if they themselves became infected’ (Leclerc-Madlala Reference Leclerc-Madlala1997: 371).

Given our definition of ethics as overarching abstract principles, putting ethics into practice thus necessarily involves translating socially encompassing aspirations to the specificities of local situations and contexts. In this process, universalist ethical claims are practically scaled down and made to focus on very specific people or organizations to whom ethical claims are directed and who are turned into ‘objects of ethics’ through this process.

Two case studies in this issue – one on a charity event at a religious school in Tanzania (Dilger) and the other on healing rituals of Islamic healers in Kenya (Parkin) – demonstrate how people's ethics as ideals in practice bring about specific objects of ethics, such as orphans deserving charity (Dilger) and patients seeking medical advice (Parkin). In a similar vein, the ethics of care as pursued by male youth in urban Guinea Bissau are directed towards their relatives and therefore represent an important motivation for them to enter the precarious drug trade (Vigh). However, objects of ethics do not necessarily remain stable over a long period of time. Instead, their specific qualities, composition and delimitation are often rendered problematic in social negotiations and contestations, partly because those sections of society who are targeted as objects by the ethical claims of others do not always or necessarily acquiesce to being ascribed this role, as Bochow argues for HIV policies and education in Botswana. Similarly, Kirsch demonstrates that the claims by volunteers in the field of civic crime prevention that they protect their neighbours is at times expressly contested by the very people they claim to serve. On the other hand, van Dijk shows that ethics have a certain elasticity, in that people can contest them without denying or altogether rejecting them.

‘Ethical stuff’, boundary work and ethical dilemmas

The ‘contents’ of ethical claims and commitments are not the primary focus of this special issue. Although it is unquestionably worthwhile to study such ‘contents’, our contributors follow a different track. They take inspiration from Fredrik Barth's work on ethnicity, which is concerned less with the ‘cultural stuff’ (Barth Reference Barth1969: 15) mobilized to establish, maintain or contest ethnic boundaries than with ethnic boundary making itself. In an analogous fashion, they do not attempt to gather up and probe in detail the ‘ethical stuff’ to which specific groups of people subscribe. Instead, they emphasize the fact that ethical claims and commitments can and are being used by actors to constitute, negotiate, consolidate or challenge the social and/or institutional boundaries delimiting (self-professed) communities of ethics. It is the exploration of how boundaries shift between different subjects of ethics, as well as between the subjects of ethics and their respective objects, which is their primary concern.

Such processes at times create situations in which ethical claims and ethical practice fail to match. In contrast to classical traditions of moral philosophy, which take such dilemmas as an indication of a fundamental loss of identity – and hence agency – in an ethically fragmented world, our contributors are interested in people's reactions to and reformulations of individual and institutional agency when confronted with ethical dilemmas. These reformulations concern the question of what it means to ‘do good’, ‘lead a better life’ or ‘make a difference’.

Dilemmas like these are characteristic of the religious educational landscape in urban Tanzania, where teachers may perform religious rituals in the context of their work (such as common prayers) while personally belonging to a different denomination from the one operating the school (Dilger, this issue). Or, in the case of HIV education in Botswana discussed by Bochow, people may adhere to messages of safe sex and yet at the same time engage in unprotected sexual intercourse in order to fulfil their aspirations to have children. Among traditional healers in Kenya (Parkin, this issue), seemingly irreconcilable ethics can be shown to operate alongside each other, such as the medical ethics of healing and the religiously inspired ethics of care. Moreover, as van Dijk notes, conflicts over competing ethical claims are sometimes allowed a certain level of convivial elasticity rather than being pushed to the extremes of contention: ethical dilemmas seem to live tacitly just beneath the surface.

Cleavages and alliances in ‘ethical fields’

In combining the analytical foci outlined above, we are taking account of the fact that ethics as ideals are always relational in social practice. At first sight, there is nothing surprising about the idea that ethics are part of social relationships. However, this does not necessarily imply a clear-cut correlation between a specific set of ethical commitments on the one hand, and a particular group of people on the other. Instead, there are dynamic interplays between different ethical claims and commitments that only sometimes conflict. At times they are brought into situational alliances despite being positioned as mutually incompatible at other times and in other contexts.

In order to understand how these dynamics play out within what we call ‘ethical fields’, a term loosely adopted from Bourdieu's (Reference Bourdieu1991) ‘religious field’, let us look at another of Gluckman's classic studies. In his ‘Analysis of a social situation’ (Reference Gluckman1958 [1940]), he examined the variety of social actors present at the ceremonial opening of a bridge in colonial South Africa, which allowed him to analyse the structured relationships between subsections of the ‘white’ and ‘black’ population and to show the existence of a number of cross-cutting cleavages and alliances. Among those attending the event was ‘a group of Christian Zulu [who stand] in close relationship with some Whites, and [which therefore] represents a sphere of Zulu-White co-operation’ (ibid.: 61). At the same time, however, ‘all Christian Zulu are closely associated with pagan Zulu in many ways, and they get no equality with Whites in or outside Churches’ (ibid.). What follows from this is a social configuration of great complexity which is worth quoting at some length:

If we replace ‘belief’ with ‘ordinary ethics’, we can see how a similar logic of cross-cutting cleavages and alliances is characteristic of ethical fields in present-day Africa. In these fields, ethical claims and commitments serve as registers of language and action that are employed by people when perceiving, making sense of and evaluating the social realities they are confronted with, as well as when attributing a specific ethical value to them. Further, by drawing on them in context-dependent ways, use of these registers can help establish connections or disconnections between different subjects and socialities.

The contours and characteristics of ethical fields on the African continent have undergone momentous changes in recent decades, owing to societal challenges brought forth by large-scale violent conflicts; rising concerns about the failure of political systems, inequalities, corruption and human rights; natural disasters and epidemics such as the HIV/AIDS pandemic; the appearance of new transnational actors and agencies; people's increased connectivity and mobility made possible by innovations in the fields of media and technological infrastructure; and the rapidly advancing diversification of lifestyles and life opportunities. No less than a transformation of previous decades and centuries, these processes of change, our contributors show, are leading to the emergence of new ethical fields as well as to the reconfiguration of existing ones.

That people are struggling with their respective ethical commitments not only has to do with the contingencies of life, or the fact that ethics as ideals of practice can never be identical with how they are practised in reality. It also results from the messy, multifaceted and often inconsistent nature of the transformations referred to above. The dynamics within ethical fields as well as between them are characterized by a ‘mutual contest of sameness and difference on a stage characterised by radical disjunctures between different sorts of … flows and the uncertain landscapes created in and through these disjunctures’ (Appadurai Reference Appadurai1990: 308).

Within different ethical fields in Africa – whether relating to international interventions, nation-state formation or human rights – processes of the explication and implication of ethics are evident. In addition, each ethical field brings forth a particular ‘cultivation’ of that field by the respective subjects of ethics. Yet, the overlaps and disjunctures of ethical fields within a given social context mean not only that the social location of the ethical subject has become much more complex (if not confusing) than before, but also that the ethical ‘labour’ that individuals and communities are required to perform has become more exacting, more demanding and more controversial. This is because, in contemporary Africa, the emergence of ‘ordinary ethics’ as ideals in practice that belong to a lived-in world of experience, cognition and sentiment can no longer be taken for granted. Instead, the making and unmaking of ethical fields reflect, among many other things, ongoing transformations of religious landscapes and kinship structures as well as the reworking of human rights-related judicial systems and people's attempts to cope with massive insecurities, inequalities and violence (Kirsch Reference Kirsch, Kirsch and Grätz2010). While the particular ways of cultivating ethical fields, as discussed in the case studies in this special issue, can be said to be uniquely African, they are also transversally informative of the underlying processes of ethical formations in general and the ways in which new social locations of ethical subjects come about.