ABSTRACT
The anthropology of morality and the morality of anthropology are separate yet inextricable issues. They can be considered separate in a narrowly defined methodological sense; and they are inextricable in a theoretical and practical sense. It is from a methodological perspective that anthropologists tend to offer their students the rather crude idea that they, as observers, should suspend judgement in order to understand and make sense of other people’s morality. This chapter presents two metalogues on moral anthropology. One is called ‘Three perspectives on morality and the absurdity of their coexistence’; the other, ‘Wobbly universalism’. The first metalogue distinguishes between three types of philosophical-methodological-anthropological perspectives on morality and concludes that the tension between them cannot—and should not—be resolved. The second metalogue argues that relativism, moral and otherwise, is a desert that anthropologists, as well as non-anthropologists in search of open-mindedness, need to cross.
