Periodic Reporting for period 4 - JUSTAM (Justice, Morality, and the State in Amazonia)
Reporting period: 2021-10-01 to 2022-12-31
Justice, Morality, and the State in Amazonia (JUSTAM) is a five-year research project that investigated the social, cultural and cognitive bases of justice, or the morally correct assignment of goods and evils. How, why and when do people make moral judgements about what is right or just? How are such judgements influenced by social and cultural factors, such as early childcare practices, local theories of mind, or the relative presence or absence of markets and the state? The project explored these questions with an empirical focus on the indigenous peoples of Western Amazonia, using ethnographic as well as experimental research methods to develop an analysis of issues ranging from emotions, fairness, entitlement and equality in contexts of resource distribution, to punishment, vengeance, and attributions of responsibility. This research has helped to enlarge our understanding of how and why patterns of moral judgement vary across cultures, with particular attention paid to the role played by cultural constructions of personhood. The current situation of rapid social change in Amazonia, driven largely by the increased presence of the state in everyday life, provided a unique opportunity for assessing how morality and ethics are shaped by social conditions such as the size of networks of cooperation, processes for generating consensus, and the management of conflicts and disputes. This was used to address longstanding questions concerning the evolution of morality, including how fairness is linked to cooperation within ever larger groups. As the same time, project team members have worked together and independently in order to articulate, from different perspectives, a sophisticated and distinctively Amazonian theory of justice, grounded in emotional responsiveness to others and respect for personal autonomy, that is capable of entering into critical dialogue with mainstream Western theories and understandings, while also challenging a number of dominant stereotypes of small-scale, non-state societies.
The project team members carried out a series of research trips to Urarina, Shuar, Achuar, and Cacua indigenous communities in the Peruvian, Ecuadorian and Colombian Amazon. In the field, researchers drew primarily on ethnographic methods, supplemented with studies and experiments supplemented with studies and experiments adapted from relevant work in cognitive psychology and experimental philosophy, as a way of probing nuances of intuitions and interpretations beyond what is possible using ethnography alone. In total, the project team completed around 24 months of fieldwork.
A series of workshops and events were held throughout the project, with an interdisciplinary focus, such that anthropologists were brought into dialogue with psychologists, philosophers, and cognitive scientists around topics including fairness and impartiality, responsibility, justice, egalitarianism, and values. Participants were encouraged to engage with Amazonian research data, and collaborate on identifying promising future research directions.
The project results significantly enlarge our understanding of the politics and ethics of small-scale ‘egalitarian’ societies, such as those characteristic of the Amazonian lowlands. In particular, they draw attention to the crucial role played by emotional and affective experience; the ways in which moral judgements are embedded in concrete social relationships, even when the justifications of those judgements invoke relatively abstract principles; the importance of studying children’s moral learning for understanding complex social change; the capacity to move between contrastive forms of moral evaluation, according to context, as a central dimension of ethical transformation; and the relationship between forms of government and local theories about the ‘opacity’ of other minds.
Key project outputs include two monographs, three edited volumes, a series of articles in leading peer-reviewed journals, and a short film. Results have also been disseminated in a number of workshops, conferences and special events in Europe, the US, and South America.
A series of workshops and events were held throughout the project, with an interdisciplinary focus, such that anthropologists were brought into dialogue with psychologists, philosophers, and cognitive scientists around topics including fairness and impartiality, responsibility, justice, egalitarianism, and values. Participants were encouraged to engage with Amazonian research data, and collaborate on identifying promising future research directions.
The project results significantly enlarge our understanding of the politics and ethics of small-scale ‘egalitarian’ societies, such as those characteristic of the Amazonian lowlands. In particular, they draw attention to the crucial role played by emotional and affective experience; the ways in which moral judgements are embedded in concrete social relationships, even when the justifications of those judgements invoke relatively abstract principles; the importance of studying children’s moral learning for understanding complex social change; the capacity to move between contrastive forms of moral evaluation, according to context, as a central dimension of ethical transformation; and the relationship between forms of government and local theories about the ‘opacity’ of other minds.
Key project outputs include two monographs, three edited volumes, a series of articles in leading peer-reviewed journals, and a short film. Results have also been disseminated in a number of workshops, conferences and special events in Europe, the US, and South America.
The project makes two significant methodological contributions beyond the current state of the art. The first concerns the effective integration of psychological experiments into ethnographic research. In our experience, cross-cultural psychological research, especially in small-scale societies, very often lacks ecological validity because the experimental design does not build on in-depth ethnographic knowledge and experience of the specific communities being studied. Our project drew on our existing extensive fieldwork experience in Amazonian communities as a starting point for designing tasks, prompts and experiments that were realistic and appropriate to the context, which in turn greatly improved our ability to interpret the results, especially where these were surprising or unexpected.
The second methodological achievement relates to the co-production of anthropological knowledge with local peoples. Through a series of workshops and events, we sought to develop new ways of not only explaining anthropological knowledge to our Amazonian interlocutors, but involving them in the research and writing process, including a collaboration between an Achuar elder and an anthropologist in the writing of an autobiography that will be of interest both to the anthropological community as well as local peoples in the region.
The project results thus draw on a more interdisciplinary, collaborative form of anthropology in order to significantly improve our understanding of the ways in which peoples’ ethical and political lives, especially in small-scale societies, are shaped by specific forms of governance, markets and other social institutions, and as much as evolved cognitive dispositions. It highlights the role of moral and political emotions, which are still relatively poorly understood – not least in Amazonia – and uses this to help counter a rationalist bias still pervasive in cognitive anthropology as much as in normative theories of justice.
The second methodological achievement relates to the co-production of anthropological knowledge with local peoples. Through a series of workshops and events, we sought to develop new ways of not only explaining anthropological knowledge to our Amazonian interlocutors, but involving them in the research and writing process, including a collaboration between an Achuar elder and an anthropologist in the writing of an autobiography that will be of interest both to the anthropological community as well as local peoples in the region.
The project results thus draw on a more interdisciplinary, collaborative form of anthropology in order to significantly improve our understanding of the ways in which peoples’ ethical and political lives, especially in small-scale societies, are shaped by specific forms of governance, markets and other social institutions, and as much as evolved cognitive dispositions. It highlights the role of moral and political emotions, which are still relatively poorly understood – not least in Amazonia – and uses this to help counter a rationalist bias still pervasive in cognitive anthropology as much as in normative theories of justice.