Fault Lines in the Anthropology of Ethics

In May 2001, in that year’s Malinowski Memorial Lecture at the London School of Economics, I said that there did not yet exist an anthropology of ethics (Laidlaw 2002). I tried to be clear that by this I did not mean that anthropologists did not write about morality. They have always done so, through the whole history of the discipline; indeed, it has always been central to their concerns. There being no ‘anthropology of ethics’ was a matter, rather, of the absence of debate among anthropologists as to the ethical dimension of human social life: its bases, its character, its