Social Studies of Ethics, Morality, and Values Network Meeting

At our next SSEMV Network meeting, when Asha Abeyasekera will be giving a talk about her research. All are warmly welcome!

Abstract: Moral philosophers, drawing on Aristotle, have argued that “virtues are not only to act in particular ways, but also to feel in particular ways” (MacIntyre 2002, p.149 my emphasis). Anthropologists of emotion have pointed out that moral concerns are deeply intertwined with the experience and expression of emotions, while moral anthropology has paid attention to how sentiments and sensibilities shape everyday experiences of morality. Building on these insights about the role emotions play in shaping moral personhood, I ask: how are moral sentiments transmitted across generations? More specifically, I ask how are young people taught, and how do they learn, to cultivate moral emotions? To answer these questions, I draw on fieldwork conducted in urban, middle-class Sri Lanka on laejja-baya – a deep cultural emotion encompassing a complicated, subtly graded vocabulary of shame as foundational to moral becoming among Sinhala-Buddhists. Drawing on in-depth interviews with secondary school teachers, focus group discussions with young people, and intergenerational interviews with families, I explore how morality is cultivated through emotions by describing the modes and methods used to socialize children in laejja-baya. The aims of the paper are two-fold: to illustrate the ways in which morality is intersubjectively produced; while drawing attention to moral becoming as both an affective and embodied experience.

About the speaker: Asha L. Abeyasekera is a lecturer at the Centre for Women’s Studies, University of York. Her research interests are marriage, kinship, and intimate relations; emotions and moral personhood; and homemaking and belonging in times of economic precarity. She is the author of Making the Right Choice: Narratives of Marriage in Sri Lanka (2021, Rutgers).