https://www.ucpress.edu/books/uncommon-cause/paper

Chip Zuckerman: Thank you, John, for engaging with me about your new book. I should start by telling readers that we went to graduate school together and have swapped many things over the years. This means that by the time your book reached my house, I had already seen most of it in one form or another. (In a co-authored article, we even wrote together about some of its materials (Zuckerman and Mathias 2022)!) But all these years later, while you might think this familiarity would make the book feel like an old hat arriving in the mail, I felt the opposite. It has been so satisfying to see its once rough and drafty parts coalesce and elevate into this single, polished, and fresh piece.

The book, for those yet to encounter it, traces the stories of activists in Kerala, India to probe a recognizable ethical dilemma: how can one live for what one thinks is right when other people, including people we love, get in the way? With that, let me start my questions with a question about the book’s style of writing.

The book is written beautifully. This makes it something one can sit down with and comfortably dive into. It also means it will be an excellent teaching text, which foregrounds the stories of particular people. But good writing takes work and sacrifice: you surely trimmed some prized detail, omitted some theoretical tangles not directly on your story’s path, and killed at least a handful of darlings. Can you tell me about your choice to write Uncommon Cause as you did?

John Mathias: Partly, I think the book’s story-based style just came naturally to me; it’s connected with how I think and the nature of my fieldwork style. When I was in the field, my notes came to focus on puzzles or questions that the people I was spending time with were asking—puzzles about the difficulty of mediatizing and circulating evidence of what people experienced as smelly pollution, for example, or about the paradoxical importance of fighting for the people to activists who actively distinguished themselves from what they saw as common or ordinary people. As the months went by, I watched people work through these puzzles in various ways. Not that they necessarily resolved them; sometimes they seemed to become more lost or trapped in them. But by watching how their stories unfolded, I could learn something about how the puzzle was structured and why it was puzzling,g so to speak. So many of the stories in the book were already there—in my fieldnotes but also on my mind—when I began writing.

Later in the writing process, as you suggest, I also foregrounded the stories deliberately. This was part of choosing an audience and a rhetorical angle. On audience, I wanted the book to speak to a broad readership, beyond academia, and I thought that leading with stories, rather than the literature, would do that best. As I went, I found myself less interested in whether my readers could place a particular puzzle within scholarly debates; it was more important that they could place them alongside their own experiences. I wanted them to feel the puzzles as real—to feel inspired by what inspired the activists in the book, to feel trapped when they felt trapped. And I hoped that these feelings would resonate with readers’ own experiences of desiring to live for some larger purpose or of fearing that such a purpose, if strongly held, might alienate them from their family and friends. My long-running writing group also encouraged me to lean into this, and as I wrote and revised, I deliberately elaborated on the stories of particular activists while putting much of the engagement with other scholars into the book’s subtext and footnotes.

Rhetorically, this also seemed the right tack. The book is deeply moral, but not moralizing. The activists I describe ask questions about how people ought to live; and the book, in its own way, pursues those same questions. But it does not offer any overriding answer or program for how to live; I do not, for example, make the case that we should all be more like activists. The activists in the book often disagreed about the best kind of life, after all, and their stories are full of uncertainty and contradiction. But people can learn from stories even when those stories do not have clear lessons or morals, or even satisfying endings. Stories can offer a chance to sort of feel out the stakes in another form of life from the inside—and, ideally, to appreciate how these stakes could be relevant to our own lives. In this way, stories are good for thinking through real moral dilemmas, the resolution of which (as Wittgenstein suggests) cannot be reduced to any abstract formula but must be worked out within particular circumstances and relationships.

Chip Zuckerman: In part because the book is written so accessibly, it eschews some of the in-the-weeds discussion of how its arguments relate to the anthropology of ethics, a turn that really got going leading up to and during your fieldwork. I know that you were steeped in this stuff in graduate school, because I was steeped right alongside you. Can you tell me a bit more about how you see your central argument relating to some of the big pushes in the anthropology of ethics? For instance, how does your argument relate to Laidlaw’s (2002) early argument about the need for an account of freedom, or the critique of Durkheim’s effort to make “the moral congruent with the social,” as Zigon (2007:132) put it?

John Mathias: You’re right that I was deep in this literature as I was getting into fieldwork, and it shaped my interests. One thing that drew me to study environmental activists in Kerala is that some of them (especially the more radical environmentalists that I caption as solidarity activists in the book) seemed deeply committed to principles of moral freedom and practices of critical reflection. In some sense, they took an ethics of freedom to one possible extreme: they sought to break free from the norms of their inherited communities and practice a more liberated and rational mode of ethics. So I wanted to understand what happens when people try to do that.

I think the book still presents that story. But as I dug deeper, I also found that some of the founding contrasts of the ethical turn, especially the critique of Durkheim, seemed to take one side in a debate that I was seeing worked out, and never fully won, on the ground. The emphasis in much of that work on freedom, for instance, did align closely with how some activists described their own lives, but the more time I spent with those activists, the more I saw how difficult distinctions between freedom and unfreedom, or between critical and uncritical, were for them to sustain in practice. More to the point, there was a whole subset of activists (those I call locals in the book) who seemed to see their activism in a much different way—not as a break with norms and social groups, but rather as grounded in belonging to communities. One could say, superficially, that these activists exemplified a Durkheimian approach to ethics rather than a late-Foucauldian approach, but that dichotomy would not do justice to the many ways that the stakes in solidarity activism and local activism overlapped. Ultimately, I came to see that, while the freedom/unfreedom opposition (what some caption as a distinction between“ethics and socially-enforced morality) resonated with how some activists’ described their lives, to adopt this opposition as an analytic would be to favor some ways of doing activism over others—and, moreover, to perpetuate some Western ideologies about the centrality of individual freedom and impartiality to ethics. The light the distinction threw was not worth the shadows it cast.

My distinction between living for and living from is an attempt to better capture these dynamics, whether they unfold on the streets of Kerala or on the pages of journals like Anthropological Theory and JRAI. I understand living for and living from as distinct aspects of ethical life, which can come into tension. But they are neither inherently opposed nor fundamentally aligned—their opposition or alignment is produced by the ideologies and reflexive practices of actual people, working to oppose or align them. I find a metaphor from sailing helpful: like current and wind, they can flow together or against one another, but navigating ethical life is a matter of contending with both at once.

Chip Zuckerman: You write: “[t]he quandaries that define the struggle for environmental justice in Kerala are rooted in dilemmas we all face. Each form of activist life speaks to tensions in the form of human life” (pg. 3). And in a few other moments in the book, you return to this point, arguing that the central problem that activists face—and the central problem of the book—is relevant to us all. Can you talk a bit about this, how do you see the relation between the activist form of life and human life more generally?

John Mathias: What I mean by this is, most concretely, that everyone sometimes faces dilemmas that look something like the dilemmas these activists face. Not every life is defined, as some activists’ are, by choices between radical norm-breaking and community belonging—for example, facing potential estrangement from one’s family over one’s commitment to marrying across caste. But we all experience some version of this at some point—whether to take the side of a bullied classmate and risk being ostracized oneself; whether to keep going to mosque in college; whether to reveal, over Thanksgiving turkey, that one has become vegan.

All of these experiences are rooted in the entanglement of relationships and ethics—in the reality that ethics is, inevitably, a way of relating to other people. Yet they are troubling experiences because ethics is not simply another word for social connectedness; ethics combines living for and living from, and these two aspects of ethics can conflict, even for those who work hard to keep them aligned. In that sense, the book suggests that at least some tension between the two aspects is inevitable.

The ubiquity of this tension is not, however, what I want to underline. On the contrary, my more far-reaching point is that living for and living from are not inherently opposed. I want to push back against those who overstate the tension. To see what I mean, think, for instance, of the longstanding tendency in Western moral philosophy to purify ethics of living from, under the rubric of impartiality. Environmental ethics, in its challenge to anthropocentrism, has been seen by some as an extreme (and laudable) form of this push for impartiality. Debates about anthropocentrism have largely focused on how non-humans should be valued by humans. I intervene in those debates, in part, by asking not about values but about practices of evaluating—by studying ethics in action. Studying environmentalists ethnographically, it was clear that even highly eco-centric ethics was largely a matter of navigating relationships with other people (and, in the case of some religious activists, relationships with non-human evaluators). Even when people sought to uproot their values from any grounding in particular groups (their families, their castes, their species, their planet, and so on), they enacted this project by breaking with some people and forming community with others. In this sense, relationships between humans remain central to environmental ethics.

Chip Zuckerman: In chapter’s 3, 4, and the conclusion you draw parallels between DuBois’s (2007) notion of the “stance triangle” and the dilemmas that activists face. Here is a reproduction of that stance triangle for those unfamiliar:

I think this analogy is powerful. But getting meta, your use of the analogy also bears a familiar shape. The shape is this: the details of a semiotic and/or more narrowly linguistic process become a model for some more general (and temporally dispersed) pattern of culture. We could think, for instance, of Levi-Strauss’s (1963) use of Troubetzkoy’s and Jakobson’s structuralism to talk not about the sounds of language, but about culture generally, or the more recent use of the phatic function to characterize patterns of sociality and their roles as infrastructure (Elyachar 2010), or the notion of the “subjunctive” to characterize a kind of politics (Ahmann 2019). This is a giant question, too giant for this kind of conversation, but I cannot resist asking what you think of this analogic shape, and more generally, the relation between the stance triangle as a way of characterizing a particular semiotic moment, on the one hand, and its use here to understand a more enduring emphasis someone might have—for instance, someone might emphasize attending to their relations with others (the alignment line in the triangle) over and against their commitment to a value (the evaluation line in the triangle)?

John Mathias:  This is a big question. I’d start by underlining that, as you suggest, the book does not aim to show perduring patterns in activist stance taking—for example, by tracking the prevalence of alignment in evaluative acts. This would be a really interesting project, but it was not mine. I did, however, record quite a bit of interaction in the field. Carefully transcribing some of these recordings was important to studying ethics as an activity. But the transition from alignment of utterances to alignment of lives was more about understanding activists’ ideologies about how ethical evaluation should work.

By diagramming the interdependence of the intersubjective (subject-subject) and evaluative (subject-object) aspects of ethics, the triangle offered a way to think through how this interdependence became problematic in activism. It captured a core moral problem for some activists: how to free their lives from the influence of social ties, to live only for their causes. It also helped to describe a contrasting approach to activism, in which cause should come from community. More generally, it helped to think through questions about how to balance the desire to stand for what one believes, regardless of what others think (arguably the hallmark of an activist ethics), with the desire for community belonging, which might be considered morally valuable in its own right.

It is also worth noting that the parallel you point to is arguably already present in DuBois’ article, insofar as he speaks of degrees of alignment not only of subject positions in specific stance acts but also as a property of speakers in conversation. To wit, he defines alignment as “the calibrating relationship between two stances, and by implication two stancetakers” (2007, 144). Much rests on “implication” here, of course, and in my reading it is not clear to what extent DuBois thinks of the triangle as a tool for analyzing not only stance acts but also the diachronic positioning of participants—let alone such extended modes of stance-taking as the living of an activist life. But I found the triangle valuable for the latter mode of analysis because it clarified the defining stakes, for my interlocutors, in what it meant to be an activist.  

And it did so in a way that made the condition I noted above—that ethics is a way of relating to others—visually apparent. Many have reflected on this condition, of course; Adam Smith, Erving Goffman, and Judith Butler are a few others I looked to. But the stance triangle version of this argument has that helpful combination of being both very abstract and very easy to grasp.

Chip Zuckerman: Your book takes you in a variety of interesting theoretical and empirical directions. For this final question, I wonder if you could give us all a sense of one path you chose not to take. What was left out, and is what you left on the cutting board for this book shaping what is to come for you?

John Mathias: As I was writing the book, I kept bumping up against the boundaries of ethics as a category. Especially, I thought a lot about activist discourse about self-interest, which for those I studied and for many moral philosophers is seen as a kind of defining opposition for ethics. In the book, I question the interests/values dichotomy both in activist discourse and in some anthropology and philosophy. And this, in turn, led me to think about the utility of the category of ethics itself; I settled on motive as a broader domain within which one could inquire about interests, values, and other notions of what makes people do what they do.

Motive is so core to theories of social life, yet we lack rigorous engagement with theories of motive in anthropology. Given the overwhelming emphasis of current anthropological analysis on motion—on practices, processes, social action, and so on—it seems we need to look more carefully at the motives driving the motion. So lately I’ve been thinking about how anthropological inquiry can more explicitly and rigorously explore motives. With the support of a Wenner Gren grant, I have had the opportunity to collaborate with some really brilliant minds on that (yours included, Chip!), and I am looking forward to publishing on it in the next year or two.

Empirically and methodologically, I’m excited about some new directions as well. As climate change has transformed environmental politics, I’ve become concerned with how we think about long-term futures. I’ve recently done some more applied, community-engaged work related to climate change in the US, and I’ve noticed how this genre of research tends to focus on relatively short-term problems even as we recognize that the temporal scale of climate change is vast. Some of the activists I write about in the book have noticed a similar pattern. For example, coastal fishing populations in Kerala are protesting various government efforts to relocate them, which are put forward as a way of preparing for sea level rise (that is, climate adaptation) but will also make way for a planned coastal highway. The protests are aimed at stopping the highway in the short term, but they also respond to a vision of the future that excludes fishers. There is a need to include fishers in re-imagining what long-term climate futures should look like. So now I am planning some community-engaged research in Kerala that will be less reactive and more open-ended and imaginative. My love of stories is part of this. I’d like to collaborate with members of the fishing community, and we have been discussing the possibility of writing speculative fiction together. The project itself only exists in our imaginations for now, so I won’t say too much. But stay tuned, I guess, and thanks again for engaging the book.

Work Cited

Ahmann, Chloe
 2019     “Waste to Energy: Garbage Prospects and Subjunctive Politics in Late-Industrial Baltimore.” American Ethnologist 46(3): 328–342.

Du Bois, John W.
 2007     “The Stance Triangle.” In Stancetaking in Discourse: Subjectivity, Evaluation, Interaction. Robert Englebretson, ed. Pp. 139–82. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Elyachar, Julia
 2010     “Phatic Labor, Infrastructure, and the Question of Empowerment in Cairo.” American Ethnologist 37(3): 452–464.

Laidlaw, James
 2002     “For an Anthropology of Ethics and Freedom.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 8(2): 311–332.

Levi-Strauss, Claude
 1963     Structural Anthropology. Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf, trans. New York: Basic Books.

Zigon, Jarrett
 2007     “Moral Breakdown and the Ethical Demand: A Theoretical Framework for an Anthropology of Moralities.” Anthropological Theory 7: 131–50.

Zuckerman, Charles H. P., and John Mathias
 2022     “The Limits of Bodies: Gatherings and the Problem of Collective Presence.” American Anthropologist 124: 345–357.