Against Better Judgment

Akrasia in Anthropological Perspectives

Patrick McKearney, Nicholas H. A. Evans (Herausgeber)

Buch | Hardcover

204 Seiten

2023
Berghahn Books (Verlag)
978-1-80539-000-8 (ISBN)

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Anthropologists have long explained social behaviour as if people always do what they think is best. But what if most of these explanations only work because they are premised upon ignoring what philosophers call 'akrasia' – that is, the possibility that people might act against their better judgment? The contributors to this volume turn an ethnographic lens upon situations in which people seem to act out of line with what they judge, desire and intend. The result is a robust examination of how people around the world experience weaknesses of will, which speaks to debates in both the anthropology of ethics and moral philosophy.

Patrick McKearney is an Assistant Professor at the University of Amsterdam conducting research in the UK, India, and Italy. His recent articles on disability, care, ethics, and religion include publications in Social Analysis, Ethnos, and JRAI. He has also edited two special issues on cognitive disability in The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology and Medical Anthropology.

Introduction

Patrick McKearney and Nicholas H.A. Evans

Chapter 1. Trigger Warnings: Danger, Desire, and Declensions of the Will in Eating Disorders Treatment

Rebecca J. Lester

Chapter 2. Three Problems with the Addiction as Akrasia Thesis that Ethnography Can Solve

Darin Weinberg

Chapter 3. To Live Like ‘People’: Drinking and Weakness of Will Among the Runa of the Ecuadorian Amazon

Francesca Mezzenzana

Chapter 4. Prayer, Demons, and Akratic Sublation

Jon Bialecki

Chapter 5. Troubleshooting Humans: Modelling the Pathways to Inertia, Backsliding, and Moral Transgression on Indonesia’s Hypnotherapy Circuit

Nicholas J. Long

Chapter 6. The ‘Replication’ of Caste as a Form of Collective Akrasia

Ivan Deschenaux

Chapter 7. Is Grit Irrational for Akratic Agents?

Lubomira Radoilska

Chapter 8. Relational Akrasia: Care and the Distribution of Action

Patrick McKearney

Afterword

Richard Holton

Index

Erscheinungsdatum	16.05.2023
Reihe/Serie	WYSE Series in Social Anthropology
Verlagsort	Oxford
Sprache	englisch
Maße	152 x 229 mm
Themenwelt	Geisteswissenschaften ► Philosophie ► Ethik
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Ethnologie
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie ► Allgemeines / Lexika
ISBN-10	1-80539-000-7 / 1805390007
ISBN-13	978-1-80539-000-8 / 9781805390008
Zustand	Neuware