Genealogies of Virtue
The subject of ethics and morality has received renewed attention across a wide variety of humanistic and social scientific disciplines in recent times. Drawing from some of this work, the essay outlines new directions of enquiry for the study of ethics in South Asia. Existing approaches have tended to see ethics either as an entirely conceptual system or as a form of generic false consciousness. We emphasize, by contrast, that ethics is a form of social practice which demands to be apprehended as embodied, experienced and communicated in historically contingent contexts. We argue, through reference to both our own and other recent work in the fields of history and anthropology, that South Asian ethical traditions provide ample scope for such an approach. We also seek to develop a sensitivity to the temporally entangled nature of ethics and the complex continuities and ruptures with which the figuration of a moral present in South Asia took shape.