Moral Personhood and Social Belonging

Suny College At New Paltz, New Paltz NY

Investigators

Abstract

Do local communities continue to constrain moral choices and actions in an increasingly interconnected world? Globalization has altered the terrain of communities everywhere. Borders appear less distinct as markers of place or of a unique cultural identity. At the same time, people remain embedded in influential social, kin, and religious networks. How do people respond to these different and often conflicting pressures? Their responses, sometimes benign but also sometimes terrorist, increasingly affect us all. Examining the micro-processes through which people at the local level adapt their absolutist moral systems to changing configurations of self, community, and nation will provide critically important data for social scientific theory of how globalization affects and produces morally grounded action. The research funded by this award is framed by these questions. The researcher, anthropologist Dr. Lauren Meeker (State University of New York, New Paltz), will undertake an ethnographic study of the relationship between social belonging and moral personhood. The field research will be conducted in a village community in rural northern Vietnam. This is an excellent site in which to pursue these questions because this very traditional village was affected by the government's previous rules against the traditional rituals that ground their moral system. Now, although they are again able to perform the rituals, the government is promoting such activities as national heritage, a Western concept introduced through globalization. The researcher focuses on two broad questions: First, how is contemporary moral personhood negotiated, embodied, and shaped in and across popular Buddhist, communal, and lineage rituals in the village? Second, what do local ritual practices reveal about the relationship between heritage, place and identity in post-reform Vietnam? Data will be gathered through participant observation in daily life and at the annual village festival and other important rituals, as well as semi-structured and informal interviews with ritual experts and participants. The researcher will study how morality is defined and expressed and how perceptions of morality coincide or differ across ritual contexts. In addition, she will document and look at the effects of changing social ties in the village, in particular those resulting from recent attempts by lineage elders to expand extra-village connections. Understanding how villagers are responding to intensified and broader contact with others and how they reconcile those responses with moral responsibility to their local community is a central goal of this investigation into how conceptions of moral personhood are shaped and expressed through local practices affected by external interventions.