Between Reproduction and Freedom: Morality, Value, and Radical Cultural Change

Two broad trends mark the emerging anthropology of morality. One, following Durkheim, sees all routine, normative social action as moral. The other, in direct opposition to this, defines an action as moral only when actors understand themselves to perform it on the basis of free choices they have made. I argue that both approaches capture aspects of the social experience of morality. In light of this, a key question becomes how to explain why in any given society some cultural domains are dominated by Durkheimian moralities of reproduction while others encourage people to construe moral action in terms of freedom and choice. I argue that a model of cultures as structured by values can help us explain why cultural domains differ in this way and that the study of situations of radical cultural change reveals this with great clarity, as I show with data from Papua New Guinea.