ABSTRACT
Moral concepts have always been used to pursue political agendas. However, since the events of September 11 2001, the pervasive language of terror and freedom has come to dominate the global public sphere to an unprecedented degree. This generalising rhetoric conceals a myriad of complexities and is in turn likely to generate responses whose significance is only beginning to be understood. This chapter makes a preliminary attempt to look beneath this monolithic discourse. As Halliday (2002: 213) warns, the two conventional responses to great historical events, to say that nothing has changed or to say that everything has changed, are both misleading and preclude accurate analysis. Rather than assuming change, I take 9/11 as a critical moment or historical ‘conjuncture’ (Sahlins 1981), in which a new event radically inter-relates and recombines existing beliefs and assumptions. Drawing on fieldwork in Mexico immediately after the attack on the Twin Towers, I examine the varied nature of the morally inflected conversations that developed in one specific place in reaction to news of the attacks. I explore the way in which critical events (Das 1995) and new historical conjunctures can generate a power of ‘disclosure’. They lay bare incipient tensions and commitments, revealing a hitherto imperfectly grasped state of affairs, and generating a process of evaluation that is itself a social exchange. Taking an ethnographic example outside the immediate and misleading nexus of ‘West’ or ‘Islam’ helps to reveal the various ways in which people understood and responded to the moment of impact, made meaningful within the framework of their own beliefs, values and concerns.1
