Sustainable Development Goals

Abstract/Objectives

This experimental seminar explores the emerging field of an anthropology of “the good." We will begin with a debate on the anthropology of bright and dark and move to examine different agents and media of ethics. Through ethnographic and theoretical readings in roughly chronological order of the publications, we will explore the ideas of piety and relativism, virtue and freedom, humanitarianism, ethicalization and affordance, love and care, development and the good life, happiness and purpose in life, multi-species and pluralism, and, finally, religion and values. Students are invited to engage with “the ethical” on two levels: writing a short essay about the ethical in class, and imagining and designing a wellbeing multimodal project.

Results/Contributions

Throughout the semester, we engaged in an intensive study and reflection on various anthropological theories and ethnographic cases concerning "the good". For their final projects, students utilized the course readings to analyze their own respective fieldwork.

The research topics were diverse and insightful, including:

·      Ethical affordances of social media platforms: Focusing on "Cui" (the Taiwanese nickname for Threads) and the "Chain Superman" of Fata'an, Guangfu, Hualien.

·      Gender ethics in street dance.

·      The ethics of word counts on Han Chinese tombstones.

·      Moral experiments of the "Shamatte" (a Chinese subculture).

·      Commerce and reciprocity within online/off-line communities.

·      Female factory workers and the I-guan Dao religion: politics of piety

The results of these investigations were highly prolific and rich in content.

Keywords

Ethics, good life, humanitarianism, development, happiness, purpose in life, pluralism, values

Contact Information

黃芊妤 (C. Julia Huang)
cyhuang@mx.nthu.edu.tw