berghahn New York · Oxford

Contents

Introduction
Patrick McKearney and Nicholas H.A. Evans

Chapter 1. Trigger Warnings: Danger, Desire, and Declensions of the Will in Eating Disorders Treatment
Rebecca J. Lester

Chapter 2. Three Problems with the Addiction as Akrasia Thesis that Ethnography Can Solve
Darin Weinberg

Chapter 3. To Live Like ‘People’: Drinking and Weakness of Will Among the Runa of the Ecuadorian Amazon
Francesca Mezzenzana

Chapter 4. Prayer, Demons, and Akratic Sublation
Jon Bialecki

Chapter 5. Troubleshooting Humans: Modelling the Pathways to Inertia, Backsliding, and Moral Transgression on Indonesia’s Hypnotherapy Circuit
Nicholas J. Long

Chapter 6. The ‘Replication’ of Caste as a Form of Collective Akrasia
Ivan Deschenaux

Chapter 7. Is Grit Irrational for Akratic Agents?
Lubomira Radoilska

Chapter 8. Relational Akrasia: Care and the Distribution of Action
Patrick McKearney

Afterword
Richard Holton

Index

Against Better Judgment

Akrasia in Anthropological Perspectives

Edited by Patrick McKearney and Nicholas H. A. Evans

Afterword by Richard Holton

204 pages, bibliog., index

ISBN 978-1-80539-000-8 Hb Published (June 2023)

eISBN 978-1-80539-001-5 eBook

Details

“This volume opens up the important subject of akrasia, one that any approach to the relationship between judgment and action needs to address. It is a very welcome addition to the literature.” • Michael Lambek, University of Toronto

Anthropologists have long explained social behaviour as if people always do what they think is best. But what if most of these explanations only work because they are premised upon ignoring what philosophers call 'akrasia' – that is, the possibility that people might act against their better judgment? The contributors to this volume turn an ethnographic lens upon situations in which people seem to act out of line with what they judge, desire and intend. The result is a robust examination of how people around the world experience weaknesses of will, which speaks to debates in both the anthropology of ethics and moral philosophy.

Patrick McKearney is an Assistant Professor at the University of Amsterdam conducting research in the UK, India, and Italy. His recent articles on disability, care, ethics, and religion include publications in Social Analysis, Ethnos, and JRAI. He has also edited two special issues on cognitive disability in The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology and Medical Anthropology.

Nicholas H. A. Evans is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and author of Far From the Caliph’s Gaze: Being Ahmadi Muslim in the Holy City of Qadian (Cornell University Press, 2020).

Series: Volume 14, WYSE Series in Social Anthropology

Subject: Anthropology (General) Anthropology of Religion Medical Anthropology

Area:

LC: BF447 .A44 2023

BISAC: SOC002010 SOCIAL SCIENCE/Anthropology/Cultural & Social; PHI005000 PHILOSOPHY/Ethics & Moral Philosophy; SOC026040 SOCIAL SCIENCE/Sociology/Social Theory