Ethical pedagogies and/of relationality

Abstract

In the introduction to this special section, I discuss the way in which a focus on pedagogy in ethical practice can provide insights regarding the multifaceted nature of subjectivity, as well as the tendency of ethical learning, broadly understood, to establish new forms of relationality. I interrogate the way in which pedagogy is currently discussed in the anthropology of ethics, working to develop an understanding based on the notion of contingency. These points emerge from the ethnographic and theoretical insights in the articles in this special section, which examine sites and processes of ethical learning across various religious and secular domains in Asia. Precisely because the articles in the collection draw on various theoretical perspectives on ethics and encompass a wide scope of ethnographic contexts, they enable a conversation about the way in which various ethics of relationality are socialized, negotiated, and potentially transformed in the process.