The Ethics of Dwelling and the Politics of Worldbuilding

Seminar (this Friday) and Open Lecture (next Wednesday) with Jarrett Zigon

William and Linda Porterfield Professor of Biomedical Ethics, University of Virginia

The last decade, Jarrett Zigon been a strong voice in the theoretical debates concerning the anthropological exploration of ethics and, notably, how phenomenological approaches to the ethical and moral experience are not only methodologically fruitful, but ontologically necessitated by the object of study. Early on, Zigon influenced the anthropological exploration of morality with his notion of the moral breakdown, with his Morality – An Anthropological Perspective (Berg 2008), which was one of the very early books formative of “the ethical turn”, and most recently with his notions of the ethics of dwelling and the politics of worldbuilding. Along with his merits in anthropology, Zigon is a thinker with a philosophical sensibility, a strong grounding in philosophy and notably phenomenology, and a marked ambition of setting his philosophical thinking, his “critical hermeneutics”, to work for the creation of new possibilities for building worlds more apt for human dwelling.

In an informal setting and on basis of two chapters from his recent book Disappointment (Fordham 2018), we will discuss, with Zigon, the notions of an ethics of dwelling and the role of attunement herein. These concepts immediately invoke both the phenomenological, mainly (post) Heideggerian, tradition and engage critically the tradition of philosophical ethics. As regards the former, Zigon takes his main inspiration of Heidegger’s later work on Dwelling and develops this in the direction of an existential imperative that inherently also contains a certain ethical demand for dwelling well. As regards the latter, Zigon, rather than advocating for a mere heuristic devise in the analysis of ethnographic material, advances the notion of an ethics of dwelling as an ontologically motivated corrective to, on the one hand, modern moral philosophy’s focus on, for instance, “dignity” and, on the other hand, the uncritical appropriation of such a subjectivist bias in the anthropology of ethics. Hence, at the heart of Zigon’s work there is a strong philosophical ambition.

We invite anyone with an interest in ethics, political theory, critical thinking, phenomenology and the challenges of working at the intersection of anthropology and philosophy to participate.

RSVP: Please sign up by writing an email to Rasmus Dyring, filrd@cas.au.dk. I will send you the two chapters you are asked to read before the seminar.