Introduction

We live in an era of far-reaching intellectual uncertainty, not just for social and cultural anthropology, but for social and philosophical inquiry in general. The idea of an ‘Anthropology of the Enlightenment’ set running many of the intellectual hares that still figure in twenty-first-century social science, central amongst which is a seemingly irreducible contrast between the breathing, imagining, free-acting moral human individual as against objective ‘systems’ that seem to envelop it at a larger scale. Exchange is the rational means of forming social connection, and communicating, with, people outside our immediate circles of sympathy. Disinterested exchange beyond the local circle offers the path to a kind of freedom through self-differentiation. Singly and together the contributions interrogate how ‘moral sympathy’ might be situated in contemporary anthropological thinking on social relations and personhood, on identity and civil society.