The present study explores the cultural politics of ethical T identity in the Nilgiri region of south India and analyses how collective agents-the indigenous tribal community called Jênu Kurumba, the state of Tamil Nadu, and a recently established religious cult dedicated to a god called Sanesvara-articulate and debate ideas about how to live a good life: what the concepts mean and demand in terms of strong values, virtues, and conceptions of the good. It also examines how such ideas are constructed and articulated in political and cultural performances: in the elaborate ritual discourses of the Jēnu Kurumba, in a political performance of the Tamil Nadu state, and in the religious performative discourse of Sanesvara.
The ethical self-understandings constructed in such performances are also political processes in themselves. They articulate a particular mode of identity politics, a 'politics of becoming or what Michel Foucault (1997a: 256) has termed the 'ethico-political'. This type of identity politics is concerned with the creation of ethical forms of life in a heterogeneous and potentially antagonistic political field. The present inquiry analyses how this type of politics is put to work in a postcolonial political space. It examines how these different self-understandings correlate, how they are argued, claimed, and challenged, and how they constitute an ethical politics of identities involving creativity, antagonism, hegemony, and cultural resistance.
Note that the type of identities we are concerned with here are not only ethical positions with respect to the good or a good life, but they are also the product of an engaged and deliberate search for convincing ethical standpoints. Moreover, the quests people pursue are not about personal preferences or individual likes and dislikes but rather about ways of life, values, and desires that are regarded as most valuable, of excellent importance, and indispensable in an existential sense. Such identities and ideas are not only ethical in nature but also the result of what Charles Taylor (1989) has called 'engaged practical reason'. Engaged practical reason is the faculty of ethical reasoning, deliberation, and argumentation as well as the specific form of rationality through which we negotiate, argue, and define ways of good living, and simultaneously provides ideas of the 'good' with the power of the ethico-political. The central argument of this book is that cultural anthropology has generally overlooked this faculty, therefore, the many voices engaged in debating the 'good life' have escaped our attention. In other words, I propose that an adequate analysis of such ethical quests, debates, and collective values demands that we concede this particular type of practical reason to the people being studied.
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