An ethics of dwelling and a politics of world-building: a critical response to ordinary ethics

In this essay I provide a critical reading of so-called ‘ordinary ethics’ in order to disclose how it ultimately undoes two of the three major contributions of the anthropology of moralities and ethics: that is, ordinary ethics ultimately equates morality/ethics with all social activity and at the same time only accounts for morality/ethics in terms of the moral concepts already provided by the Western moral philosophical tradition. In the second part of this essay I provide an ethnographic example from anti-drug war political activism that shows how a critical hermeneutics provides a theoretical-analytical framework for the radical rethinking of both the moral tradition and the social and political worlds that mobilize the concepts and assumptions of this tradition.