LEMPERT, M. No Ordinary Ethics

Article
Anthropological Theory
13(4) 370–393
No ordinary ethics ! The Author(s) 2013
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Michael Lempert DOI: 10.1177/1463499613505571
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University of Michigan, USA
Abstract
‘Ordinary ethics’ suggests that everyday discursive interaction – interaction mediated by
actual language use – has tacit ethical dimensions. This line of inquiry is productive for
the anthropology of ethics and has the potential to reframe long-standing language-
based research on everything from conversational turn-taking to politeness displays, but
what does it mean to speak of discursive practice as a locus for ethical life? To what
extent is the ethical inscribed in the ground-rules of interaction, or conditioned from
below (e.g. biologically-based cooperative predispositions) or from without (e.g. cultu-
rally-institutionalized moralities)? The presumption that ethics is immanent in practice
continues to distract from the problem of how to narrate, and theorize, the entangle-
ments of discourse and ethics.
Keywords
Discourse, ethics, Goffman, Habermas, interaction, language, morality, ordinary
language, reflexivity, scale
In Michael Lambek’s (2010) provocative volume Ordinary Ethics, ‘ordinary’ means

an ethics that is ‘relatively tacit, grounded in agreement rather than rule, in practice
rather than knowledge or belief, and happening without calling undue attention to
itself’ (Lambek 2010: 2). Echoing the ‘ordinary language’ philosophy of old (see
also Das 2012), whose contributors included Austin and the later Wittgenstein, this
work also inspires a turn toward actual language use, toward discourse. Austin, as
Jack Sidnell (2010) reminds us, tried to get moral philosophers to see that even
mundane acts like excuses in conversation could serve as a window onto the ethical.
Like Lambek, Veena Das (2012: 134) has tried to effect a turn from ‘thinking of the
ethical as made up of judgments we arrive at when we stand away from our ordin-
ary practices to that of thinking of the ethical as a dimension of everyday life’.1
Ordinary ethics is an important turn. It gets us to stop privileging overt rational
reflection and ‘choice’ and encourages us to look beneath highly visible
Corresponding author:
Michael Lempert, University of Michigan, Department of Anthropology, 101 West Hall, 1085 S. University
Avenue, Ann Arbor, MI 48109, USA.
Email: mlemp@umich.edu
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Lempert 371
institutionalized discourses, such as codes of bioethics and religious conduct. It

invites us take interaction more seriously, since, after all, ‘one does not develop
morality all by oneself’ (Keane 2010: 74; n.d.). In doing both, it spotlights practice
and stimulates commerce with fields like linguistic anthropology and sociolinguis-
tics that specialize in discursive interaction but mostly haven’t given ethics its due.
I want to contribute to this turn by registering a concern about the curious ease
with which ordinary ethics locates ethics in practice and in discursive practice in
particular. What could it mean to say that ethics is, as Lambek (2010: 1), Das, and
their colleagues aver, ‘intrinsic to speech and action’ (emphasis mine)? I want to
argue that whatever else the ‘ordinary’ in ordinary ethics might mean, it cannot
mean a fluent, effortless immanence. Ordinary ethics is not ordinary in this sense of
being unproblematically there, findable, as if locating it were as easy as turning
over a stone.
The performative contingency of ordinary ethics – the fact that ethical events
require communicative labor to happen and are hence precarious achievements –
complicates the very notion that the ethical is intrinsic to practice. Consider Das,
who narrates with eloquence how ‘small acts’ (Das 2012: 139) can do big things,
from care to harm, without ever announcing what they do (Das 2007, 2010a,
2010b). Drawing on her work in low-income neighborhoods in Delhi, she recounts,
for instance, how she learned to appreciate the ‘delicacy of maintaining regard for
others through the minutest of gestures,’ as in cases where ‘women would refrain
from sweeping the floor right after a guest had left because that might suggest that
‘‘We think that guest is just trash’’ ’ (Das 2012: 135). She contrasts such seemingly
small, tacit acts with ‘dramatic enactments’ of ethical value, the latter including
everything from the multi-party histrionics of public ritual to legal-juridical rulings
on right and wrong. Das relies on a rhetoric of immanence in her appeal for
ordinary ethics, though she does complicate this immanence in limited ways. She
sensitizes us to effort – to degrees of moral ‘striving’ (Das 2010b, 2012) that occur
within the everyday and are pronounced under conditions of abject poverty and
violence. This exposes the fragility of ethical events, but once we scrutinize real-
time ethical events with recordings and transcripts – as researchers on interaction
do – we can see more vividly just how precarious ethical events are. I want to dwell
on this precariousness and argue that the study of ordinary ethics could do more to
illuminate the labor and methods through which actors strain to make the ethical
not just effective but intersubjectively evident.
To the extent that ethical activity is kindled through discursive interaction rather
than being an ever-present quality of it, we must remain alive to performative
felicity, and failure. A virtue of the small but growing literature on morality in
interaction, which I sample below, is precisely its attentiveness to the fraught dis-
cursive ‘work’ (Drew 1998) of moralization. While this literature has its limitations
for anthropology, it details discursive methods for making ethics matter in inter-
action. In an essay on complaints about misconduct aired during phone conversa-
tions, conversation analyst Paul Drew (1998: 322) is at pains to show that no
behavior is ‘self-evidently, intrinsically, or inherently morally reprehensible’ and
372 Anthropological Theory 13(4)
that ‘moral character is constituted through the descriptive practices associated

with complaining’. More deeply, Drew reminds us that ‘[o]rdinary or mundane
conversation is not of course pervasively about morality’ (1998: 296), that inter-
actants have to do things to kindle moralization. Indeed, the ethical sometimes
goes not just unremarked but unfelt. Making ethics matter in discursive
interaction – making it intersubjectively recognizable and pragmatically conse-
quential – can sometimes seem as impressive a feat as materializing an incorporeal
agent, like a spirit or god whose presence depends on an awful lot of semiotic and
interactional labor. Ordinary ethics may not be so ordinary after all. Its presence
can’t be taken for granted.
There is a second sense in which immanence misleads. Just as the lure of imma-
nence distracts us from noticing how actors invoke and register the ethical in
practice, so, too, does it exaggerate the immediacy and localizability of ethical
events. If everyday practice is a locus for ethical life – as the appeal to the ordinary
often suggests – then we wonder: what kind of ethics appears in discursive
interaction – interaction mediated by concrete instances of language use – and
what relation, if any, might this have to the full-blown moral discourses and
institutionalized doctrines that ordinary ethics says it brackets? Ethics may seem
to lurk in everything from conversational turn-taking to verbal politeness to embo-
died acts of considerateness – refilling a cup, holding open a door – but how do we
as analysts, to say nothing of the social actors we study through copious recordings
and faithful transcripts, ‘locate’ (Lambek 2010: 39) and specify the ethical with
respect to the everyday behavior in which it is enacted? Is it adventitious or inher-
ent, exogenous or endogenous, parallel or orthogonal, rhizomic, entangled, or
enmeshed? Might ethics even be hewn into the foundation of interaction, where
it supplies the tacit, taken-for-granted ground rules of the ‘interaction order’
(Goffman 1983)?
Declaring ethics to be immanent in discursive practice waves off such questions,
even if its stress on immanence ironically makes them that much more pressing, as
we shall see. But let us first recall how familiar this restless questioning over ethics’
whereabouts is. Ethics has long seemed the fugitive, for many chase it to its pre-
sumptive source, winding their way to ‘cultural,’ ‘social’ or ‘biological’ provenance.
(One need only glance at the entrancing oscillations of the nature-nurture see-saw,
where some, for example, pursue morality’s evolutionary roots in nonhuman pri-
mate cognition while others declare the roots shallow, entwined only in the soft
contingencies of history or culture.) The very search for ethics’ source betrays
disciplinary commitments to objects of knowledge to which deference is still
owed, and duly paid, thereby reassuring those in these fields that they still have
something solid and perhaps even epistemologically irreducible under their feet.
Others claim to have given up the chase and rest content with knowledge of what is
now something of an anthropological commonplace: that ethics isn’t a separate
‘domain’ but is rather so entangled in other practices and domains of life that it
makes little sense to try to stake out its boundaries or trace its roots. Advocates of
ordinary ethics would concur, to the extent that they view ethics as an immanent
Lempert 373
dimension of everyday life. I want to argue that this does not and cannot end the
chase, however, and that we need to examine with more care how the communi-
cative labor used to invoke ethical events does not so much expose a latent dimen-
sion of practice as much as cobble together or ‘assemble’ (cf. Latour 2005) the
ethical from diverse and often far-flung materials, creating entanglements from
which ‘ethics’ can neither be wrested nor said to be anywhere in particular.
In this essay I explore the consequences for ordinary ethics of taking seriously
this communicative labor. I sample discourse-centered literature, ranging from
work on politeness to moral indirectness to ritualization, in order to suggest how
the assumption of ethics’ immanence in discursive practice has come at the expense
of an appreciation of ethical contingency and entanglement. The literature cited
spans fields and is by necessity a very small sampling. I highlight a few tendencies
that are instructive for what they tell us about the state of the problem as a whole
and for where they point in terms of future research in ordinary ethics.
1. Is morality immanent ‘in’ interaction?

The idea that ethics is intrinsic to discursive practice would seem well supported by
research on interaction. In Ordinary Ethics, conversation analyst Jack Sidnell
(2010) pages back to Austin’s (1961) prescient essay ‘A Plea for Excuses’ which,
despite its introspective methods and fixation on words rather than stretches of
discourse, usefully suggested that moral philosophy turn for its evidence to every-
day talk. Everyday conversational practices seem to presuppose ethical principles.
As conversation analysis has demonstrated, rarely do we brusquely decline an
‘offer’ or ‘invitation,’ for instance; instead, we temper our refusals with such behav-
ior as palliatives (‘that’s awfully kind of you’), speech delays (filled or unfilled
pauses) and dysfluencies (cut-off speech), and even ‘accounts’ where we state
reasons – excuses – why we can’t accept.2 Such conspicuous accounting for our
non-acceptance, together with the delicate manner in which we exhibit discomfort
and express appreciation for our interlocutor, seem to rest on a sense of moral
obligation, on what we owe others.
Or consider the bare fact that we can get someone to do something for us just by
expressing how we feel (e.g. a ‘response cry’ [Goffman 1978] like brrr) or by assess-
ing some external state of affairs (e.g. ‘it’s chilly in here’.). Linguistics research in
pragmatics marveled at first at the roundabout manner in which these expressions
seemed to convey their meaning, treating them as ‘indirect’ speech acts (Searle
1975), though we may also wonder why a speaker’s alleged discomfort should
cue assistance at all. Does some principle of altruism, cultural or natural, mediate
the response to such expressions, and, if so, what additional data-points and evi-
dence must one include in order to illuminate this mediation?
Teasing out such principles from discourse seems no mean feat, but, then again,
perhaps we don’t need to. Perhaps interaction has its ‘own’ ethics. Erving Goffman
(1959, 1967) suggested this when he spoke of interaction as a moral order. He wrote
with elegance and unnerving acuity about the thousand little obligations humans
tacitly uphold when they interact. The labor of ‘mutual monitoring’ (Goffman
1966) in which speakers in their ‘eye-to-eye ecological huddles’ (Goffman 1966:
95) busily scan their interlocutor’s face and body and speech for signs of attention
and response, and the way hearers, for their part, offer backchannels such as head
nods and minimal responses like ‘uh huh,’ to signal their alleged attunement, sug-
gests a deeply collaborative venture. At root would seem to be a mutual commit-
ment to certain ground rules of interaction, rules designed, as Goffman saw it, for
the protection of something sacred: the self (Goffman 1959, 1967).3 (For Garfinkel,
with whom Goffman is often compared, social interaction is more about the
co-construction of mutual intelligibility than the production of and care for self,
but they converge on their sensitivity to the reciprocal and cooperative nature of
interaction [see, for example, Rawls 2010].)
To what extent does this moral order derive its morality from ‘outside’ inter-
action?4 Some noted that Goffman saw interaction’s obligations more as ‘etiquette’
than ‘ethics’ proper, for he was preoccupied with the way interactants strain to
preserve a semblance of propriety in ‘ceremonial’ fashion, irrespective of whatever
‘substantive’ moral sentiments may – or may not – drive this labor (Bovone 1993).
In The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959), he deemed interactants ‘mer-
chants of morality,’ for, ‘qua performers, individuals are concerned not with the
moral issue of realizing these [moral] standards, but with the amoral issue of engin-
eering a convincing impression that these standards are being realized’ (p. 251).
Ann Rawls (1987) observed that Goffman was neither clear nor consistent here.
At times morality seemed to mean an obligation to institutionally defined roles,
which implied that one’s obligation ultimately was to social structure and that
one’s role inhabitance dutifully served this order, reproducing it in the process.
At other times – arguably more often – these obligations seemed like strictly
‘involvement obligations’ (Rawls 1987) to a sui generis ‘interaction order’
(Goffman 1983). That is, the obligations were to interaction itself and to the
joint labor of face-work that occurs within its fold. The joint labor subserves the
mission of protecting an ever vulnerable sacred self, but all this labor is specific to a
spatiotemporally delimited, diminutively scaled ‘order’.
In this view – and it is one that Rawls (2010, 2011) herself maintains – the
interaction order is its own ‘constitutive’ moral order, and one cannot assume
that this morality reinforces or even has any simple relationship to institutional
moralities outside that of the face-to-face. At one extreme (again, not an extreme
that Goffman himself always occupied), then, the ethics of interaction is specific to
interaction. Interaction is a ‘constitutive’ social order (Rawls 2010) whose ethics
does not depend on institutionalized moralities, even though it may articulate with
those moralities in varying degrees and diverse ways.5
‘Interaction’ is imagined to be hived off, its morality endogenous. Fast forward
to a recent volume on The Morality of Knowledge in Conversation (Stivers et al.
2011) and we can see a similar sensibility toward morality in interaction – at least in
terms of anchoring morality in the interaction order. The volume details how all
sorts of unstated normativities affect the expression of knowledge in conversation,
Lempert 375
which, at their most sweeping, include heuristics – tacit Gricean-style rules-of-

thumb – such as, Don’t tell people things they already know (‘speakers should not
inform knowing recipients about some state of affairs’) and Don’t say things you
don’t know (‘avoid making claims for which they have an insufficient degree of
access’ (Stivers et al. 2011: 10). Stivers (2011) looks at English ‘of course’-replies
to tag problematic questions. To the query, ‘So did you introduce her?’ for
instance, an ‘of course’ reply questions the question’s ‘askability’ (Sacks 1987) –
whether it should have even been posed; it tends to be used when ‘something
morally problematic may be the case and when questioners have epistemic access
to the answer either from interactional history or from general knowledge’ (Stivers
2011: 88).
Stivers has actually shown us more than just the manner in which ‘interactants
hold each other accountable for the rights and responsibilities associated with
epistemic access, primacy and responsibility’ (Stivers et al. 2011: 19), for is this
not also a method used to call out floutings as floutings? Likewise, a chapter by
Heinemann et al. explores how adverbs jo (Danish) and ju (Swedish) can, in
response to certain questions, signal ‘that the questioner failed to take into account
shared knowledge’ (Heinemann et al. 2011: 107). Quoting Heritage (1988: 182) on
Garfinkel’s (1967) ethnomethodological breaching experiments, the authors remind
us that ‘there is no quicker way, it appears, of provoking moral outrage than by not
using background knowledge to make sense of other people’s actions’ (Heritage
1988: 182; cited in Heinemann et al. 2011: 107). This may be, but is the content of
such moral outrage just as substantive as the ‘morality’ that was there before the
breach was fingered for repair? Keane (2010: 69 et passim) raises a similar issue
when he notes the need to distinguish acts of justification and their content from
interactional events that incite such justification. These are distinct events to be
pried apart analytically, even though the two may be entangled in specific ways
(e.g. the first may be felt to ‘cause’ the second; the second may point to, cite, or
typify the first). Let us therefore say that what these volume-contributors have
pointed out are reflexive acts that result in moralization events in subsequent
phases of interaction, ‘justification’ being but one event among many.6
This is variation here, too. Gentle though reflexive engagements like ‘of course’-
replies may be, they can be set on a continuum whose extremes include full-tilt
moral ‘breakdowns’ (Zigon 2008) in which everything screeches to a halt and the
reflexivity that erupts is acute and sustained. With video-recorded interactions of
four- and five-year-old children, volume contributor Sidnell (2011) notes a couple
of minor meltdowns in his chapter on the epistemics of make-believe. In individual
play, children use baldly asserted ‘stipulations’ to transfigure materials-at-hand
such as mundane plastic blocks into a ‘Rubik’s cube’ or wooden planks into a
‘swimming pool’. In joint play these stipulative transformations shouldn’t be
settled by fiat. They should be ‘proposed,’ left ‘open to negotiation’ (Sidnell
2011: 144), and to this end kids may append a delicate ‘okay?’ tag-question or
frame their proposal with a diplomatic ‘let’s pretend’. Which helps explain why
little Sean cries foul – ‘No that not part of the ga::me’ – when playmate Andy
summarily shoots their imagined horse without his consent: ‘An- and we shoo:t
the horse. Ba::ng. He’s dead’ (Sidnell 2011: 144). In crying foul, remedial action
may follow, such as apologies or even reasoning about how one is ‘supposed’ to
play. Again, interactants sometimes reflexively direct attention to and address
breaches in expected sequence organization (cf. Drew 1998; Zigon 2008: 141–2).
In this case the kids sometimes end up citing rules of conduct.
Though Morality of Knowledge in Conversation does not make this distinction,
its findings invite us (minimally) to distinguish between (a) ‘morality’ qua the tacit
normativities of discursive interaction and (b) ‘moralization’ events that occur in
the wake of reflexive engagements with this first-order normativity, engagements
that include the targeting of breaches for repair. (I do not intend this as an all-
encompassing distinction but as a reminder that distinct moments of semiosis are
being collapsed here, a collapse that exaggerates ethics’ immanence by telescoping
events of moralization into the behavior that occasioned it.)
A distinction between tacit, unproblematic normativity and reflexively proble-
matized normativity is a familiar one, paralleling others in the literature. Zigon
(2008, 2009), for instance, wants to distinguish ‘morality’ as enacted normativity
from ‘ethics’ as moral questioning and choice, just as (mutatis mutandis) Robbins
(2007, 2009) contrasts a Durkheimian ‘morality of reproduction’ with a ‘morality
of choice’. As Zigon suggests, these distinctions correlate with two major
approaches to the contemporary anthropology of morality: those who, in a neo-
Aristotelian or Foucauldian vein, approach ethics as embodied in practice, and
those who, in the spirit of Kant, see ethics as acts of standing apart from the world
and reasoning about it, such as from particular to general, as the categorical
imperative would have it. Apart from questions about the utility of these
dichotomies – some say it’s impossible to sustain such a distinction between
ethics and morality – what emerges from these exchanges is the recognition that
reflexivity is a critical parameter of variation.
‘Sometimes we are in the midst of action,’ writes Keane (2010: 69) in his con-
tribution to Ordinary Ethics, and ‘sometimes we seem to stand apart from it’. This
‘standing apart’ – this reflexivity – is indeed vital and is more heterogeneous than
analytic captions like ‘choice’ let on and comes in many more degrees than a trope
like moral ‘breakdown’ (Zigon 2008) allows. In the linguistic anthropology litera-
ture, ‘reflexivity’ tends to be used more expansively to mean ‘activities in which
communicative signs are used to typify other perceivable signs’ (Agha 2007: 16). It
needn’t mean ‘choice’ or require self-consciousness (see also Robbins 2009: 278),
nor is it limited to what people explicitly say ‘about’ language, language use, or
language users. Distinct, denotationally implicit varieties of reflexivity exist, which
can often be more pragmatically important precisely because they are less easily
reportable (Silverstein 1981, 1992; Agha 2007). Indeed, this variation can be sensed
in the Morality of Knowledge volume itself, since its studies illustrate how responses
to breaches vary a lot, from subtle reactions of unease (e.g. dysfluencies like cut-off
speech, markedly long pauses) to conversational repairs in which an interlocutor
calls attention to prior speech as problematic, to in-your-face indictments that spell
Lempert 377
out what’s wrong. All such responses involve reflexivity but vary along several
dimensions (e.g. degree of denotational ‘explicitness,’ degree of conventionaliza-
tion, range of semiotic modalities used, scope of participants involved and
targeted, etc.).7
In addition to appreciating the heterogeneity of reflexivity, ordinary ethics
should also consider which kinds of violations tend to draw attention in the first
place. The presumption of ethics’ immanence in interaction too often coincides
with a diffuse and underspecified sense of the ethical. As Robbins (2007) recounts,
citing Laidlaw’s (2002) influential essay, Durkheim ironically sounded the death
knell for the study of morality when he made it an object of knowledge in soci-
ology, for in wresting morality from moral philosophy he ended up reducing it to
the social. In a sense Goffman (and Garfinkel) did to the morality of interaction
what Durkheim did to the anthropology of morality: he ‘spread morality too thinly
over society, making it everywhere present but almost invisible in its role in shaping
social life’ (Robbins 2007: 294). This legacy haunts works like The Morality of
Knowledge in Conversation. While admirably faithful to the specificities of inter-
actional normativity, the volume never tells us what makes any of this normativity
distinctly ‘moral’. Morality is left undifferentiated and co-extensive with rights and
responsibilities of knowledge expression tout court. Under certain conditions but
not others, don’t we expect interactants to appeal to and cite cultural discourses on
morality more easily and extensively? Perhaps a controversial issue has been
broached or moral quandary presented.
Consider those normativities felt to cluster into metapragmatic skills, such as,
‘how to listen,’ ‘how to share the floor,’ which are culturally elaborated, inculcated,
and policed through regimes of etiquette and language socialization. In terms of
listenership, say you find yourself a hearer as a speaker shares a self-narrative of
woe. Distracted, you succumb to ‘misinvolvement’ Goffman (1957) and neglect to
emit backchannels and the occasional response cries of empathy or surprise (‘jeeze,’
‘oh my god’) expected at critical narrative junctures; and so on. Or consider an
event in which symmetrical, ‘dialogical’ turn-taking – exchanging speaker and
hearer roles with relative parity – matters a lot, as in some styles of political
debate and conflict mediation. Would violations in turn-taking and floor-sharing
here be just as likely to be targeted for repair as, say, the norms for bodily com-
portment such as how to manage one’s elbows? Clearly some things are more likely
than others to be targets of repair, and figuring out which may allow us to infer
how the moral is distributed in a given context.
The act of reflexively targeting for repair some bit of conduct is but one method
to make moralization happen. A journal issue dedicated to ‘morality in discourse’
(Bergmann and Linell 1998) opened up a discussion of the discursive methods used
to incite moralization. As co-editor Jörg Bergmann remarks in his introduction,
these methods include the obvious – lexical resources, such as names for social
types like drunkard – and the less obvious, including prosody and bodily comport-
ment. It isn’t long before Bergmann (1998: 281) bursts open the proverbial flood
gates: ‘An inconspicuous body twist, a slight rise of the eyebrows, a certain tone of
voice will suffice to give a statement a moral tinge’. So widespread and motley are
these signs that Bergmann reaches a conclusion that sounds both familiar and
unsettling: ‘Obviously, morality is omnipresent in everyday life,’ and ‘it is so
deeply intertwined with everyday discourse that the interlocutors hardly ever rec-
ognize their doings as moral business’ (1998: 281). There is a slip by which ethical
omnipresence – the capacity to see ethics everywhere if one looks hard enough –
becomes an ontological claim about ethical immanence in practice, but for now let
me expand on Bergmann’s astute comment that most events featuring moralization
do not call attention to themselves as ‘moral’ (see Drew 1998); they are not, in a
word, denotationally ‘explicit’.
Literature in linguistic anthropology and related fields is replete with illustra-
tions of this point, even if this literature does not always understand itself in these
terms. Keane’s (2011) revisiting of Jane Hill’s (1997) essay on the ‘voices’ of Don
Gabriel, for instance, reminds us well of the implicit work of moralization. When
Don Gabriel tells the poignant story of his son’s death, he makes choices at every
turn. His choices among linguistic variables (e.g. Mexicano versus Spanish, pros-
odic and stylistic contrasts) become ‘moral’ choices, because these variants help
fashion morally weighted figures – images of kinds of people that populate the
storyworld – and express the narrator’s stance toward them. All this occurs without
overt moralizing.
In fact where better to appreciate the labor of moralization than in more
extreme cases of purposeful moral ‘indirectness’ (Lempert 2012b)?8 Consider for
a moment the stealth and care by which moral criticism is quite often aired. So-
called ‘weapons of the weak’ (Scott 1985, 1990), which range from foot-dragging to
backstage griping, do not merely express resistance but also frequently invite others
to infer the source and type of injustice behind the behavior. ‘Teasing’ and
‘shaming’ are familiar methods for shaping moral dispositions through evaluation,
evaluation that is quite often purposely indirect (see, for example, Schieffelin 1987,
1990; Miller 1987; Goodwin 1990, 2006; Lo and Fung 2012; Lempert 2012a, 2012b;
in a different vein, see Foucault 1979; Drinan 2001; Keenan 2004).
Two brief examples. Consider the routinized indirectness of ‘moral irony’ con-
structions in Sakapultek, a Mayan language spoken in highland Guatemala
(Shoaps 2009). These constructions denote stances that are modalized with a non-
factual clitic + t (sometimes with the irrealis ni) and negatively evaluated with xa’.
They translate roughly as ‘as if p,’ where p is not a proposition but a propositional
stance: e.g. ‘as if being a witch didn’t matter’. Expressions like this summon an
unnamed figure, a hypothetical person other than the current speaker, who is
depicted as staking out a morally inappropriate stance – here, that being a witch
doesn’t matter, when, of course, everyone knows (or ought to) that it does! Without
lifting a finger, the Sakapultek stance-taker has seemingly managed to drag moral
truths into plain view. All she has done is invite her interlocutor to recall the moral
system the figure presupposes in order to decipher what stance she – the speaker –
‘actually’ upholds. One interlocutor starts the work of moralization while the other,
through the labor of inference, is made to finish it.
Lempert 379
Consider a more elaborate case, an entire speech genre featuring moral indir-
ectness. In his classic essay on the Western Apache genre of ‘speaking with names,’
the late Keith Basso (1988) detailed how Apache speakers could pronounce a
placename and people would fall silent as they visited the place in their mind’s
eye. These toponyms are hitched to moral-didactic narratives, stories of what the
ancestors did. In recalling the place, hearers are to recall the associated story and
grasp the allegory. Through parallels between the story and event, placenames
are credited with bringing there-and-then ancestral wisdom to bear on the here-
and-now.
‘Indirectness’ in such cases is but a caption for a deliberately distributed par-
ticipation structure, where one shifts from speaker to hearer the burden of figuring
out that ethics is relevant and who this ethics is ‘for’. All this contingent and
distributed performativity, with its hints and innuendo and inferences, makes it
easy to grasp that ethics is not unproblematically immanent, that interactants work
to invoke and infer the ethical.
2. Ethical entanglement, not immanence

Immanence implies not only the effortless presence of ethics in practice but also its
localizability – the very sense that ethics can be traced to a singular, determinate
source. Latour (2005) proposed a series of exercises that erode the sense of the
spatiotemporal localizability of interaction and can be extended to the localizability
of ethics in interaction. No interaction is, for example, ‘isotopic,’ because ‘what is
acting at the same moment in any place is coming from many other places, many
distant materials, and many faraway actors’. No interaction is ‘synchronic,’
because the pieces it comprises did not all begin at the same time (Latour 2005:
200–2). These exercises – and there are others – suggest that interaction has no
intrinsic scale (see Lempert 2009, 2012c). Actors also do things that deliberately
make the interaction order more porous, and nowhere is this more apparent than
with acts of ‘interdiscursivity,’ where people link or liken one discourse with
another (Agha and Wortham 2005). Moralization events, whether incited by
repairs or induced by ‘indirect’ means or some other method, can bring into play
ideals of virtue and non-virtue, figures of good and bad people, notions of right and
wrong, that weren’t ‘there’ in the conversation until that moment and that are
instead associated with spatiotemporally distinct domains and activities. Even
when interlocutors pause and inspect what ‘just happened’ – a norm of conduct
breached, a fraught ethical choice made, a virtue or non-virtue enacted – such
apparent discoveries ferry in as much as they find in situ. When the kids in
Sidnell’s (2011) study experience a breakdown in make-believe play and cite
rules, are they not delicately calibrating here-and-now discursive events with
authoritative discourse they’ve heard elsewhere? In these and other ways events
of moralization routinely transgress the limits of the interaction order, encouraging
us to peer past it.
Cultural routes of ‘politeness’ in interaction

If ethics is not immanent in the interaction order, than surely it must be found
elsewhere, we feel. Let us entertain this instinct and do what most do, and that is to
trace a course from interaction to some distant, constitutive ethics, be it ‘culture’ or
‘society’ above or ‘biology’ below. I will begin by following a few such routes that
depart from the landmark of ‘politeness’ behavior in interaction, with some paths
leading right back to the interaction order itself while others stretch far toward the
firmament of ‘culture’. The studies mentioned are only a handful but illustrate a
broader tendency relevant for ordinary ethics, namely, the tendency to presume a
constitutive source of ethics and hence imagine ethics as localizable, and the con-
comitant neglect of cross-domain and cross-scale entanglements that are often an
artifact of discursive practice.9
For many, if not most, it is a truism that ‘politeness’ – whatever moral facets it
may have – is an ideological instrument par excellence. ‘Politeness,’ ‘respect’ behav-
ior and the like, whether codified in etiquette manuals or inculcated tacitly in
institutional sites such as homes, classrooms, and workplaces, seem designed to
reproduce asymmetries like those of class and gender (Bourdieu 1984; Langford
1989; Hemphill 1999; Davidson 2004). A chasm separates such expansive studies
from much of the language-based studies of politeness and related phenomena (e.g.
‘deference,’ ‘respect’), however. The most industrious field here has been sociolin-
guistics, which has been heavily influenced by Brown and Levinson’s (1996) classic
but oft-challenged work, Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. Brown
and Levinson’s argument was strongly interactionist and largely bracketed the
relevance of culture. A cornerstone in their theory was the purportedly universal
notion of self-esteem or ‘face,’ a notion inspired by Goffman (1967). ‘Face’ is
something interactants supposedly take for granted when they interact, something
to which they feel both entitled and obliged to safeguard in others, so that if we
wish to do a ‘face-threatening act’ (e.g. an invitation or request that imposes on
someone), it may inspire us to twist ourselves up and perform all sorts of florid
politeness displays, from circumlocutions to hedges to hints, to mitigate the threat.
Brown and Levinson (1996: 253) resolved politeness into a polynomial expression
consisting of contextual variables including ‘P’ for relative ‘power’ between speaker
and hearer and ‘R’ for the weight of the face threat.
While the exigencies of interaction are said to explain politeness, Brown and
Levinson did admit a measure of cultural ‘skewing,’ holding that these universal
variables could be weighted differently as a function of cultural and even subcul-
tural factors. (A Tamil proscription against asking where someone’s going, for
example, is said to result in increased R for that category of speech act [Brown
and Levinson 1996: 12].) Sociolinguistic work inspired by Brown and Levinson
ventured further into culture. Sifianou (1992: 224), for example, found that
Greek ‘off-record’ requests (requests that are not explicitly reportable as requests
and hence afford the speaker plausible deniability) did not seem crafted to avoid
Lempert 381
imposition, as Brown and Levinson’s theory would predict. ‘Instead,’ she argued,
‘they provide addressees with the opportunity to express their generosity and solici-
tude for the interlocutor by offering’ (Sifianou 1992: 224). Sifianou linked this
politeness behavior to virtues of hospitality and generosity, and, more deeply, to
morally inflected conceptions of personhood in Greece.
Stronger culturalist accounts of politeness derive ethical content from wholly
outside the interaction order. In his study of interethnic service encounters between
Koreans and African-Americans in Los Angeles, Bailey (2001) suggested that
Korean storeowners and cashiers tended to adopt a taciturn demeanor that was
part of a broader style of ‘negative’ or ‘restraint’ politeness. Much like Sifianou,
Bailey fanned out from his transcript-centered observations. He cited the Korean
pragmatic notion of nunch’i – which may be glossed as ‘perceptiveness,’ ‘studying
one’s face,’ ‘sensitivity with eyes’ – and even suggested that this ‘ideal, of commu-
nicating and understanding without talk, is present in the two most important
religio-philosophical traditions of India – Confucianism and Buddhism’ (Bailey
2001: 128). Bailey saw culture in this taciturnity, and taciturnity in culture, creat-
ing, in effect, a closed circuit of interpretation. His integrative instincts led him to
move across diverse data points and evidence types, but he seems to treat these
materials as if they were all of a piece. Apparent convergence among his materials
(viz. among ‘taciturnicity’ in service encounters, a reportable ethnometapragmatic
norm of ‘perceptiveness,’ institutionalized religio-philosophical frameworks that
valorize silent communication) is read through and taken as evidence of the uni-
fying concept of ‘culture’. So much so that it would seem that beneath discourse
lurks a generative framework of cultural meaning and value – a view of culture that
has been charged as problematic for quite some time in anthropology but persists
in research on ‘crosscultural’ and ‘interethnic’ (mis)communication (Lempert
2012b: 193–5). (Indeed, a limitation of cross-linguistic research on politeness is
that it tends to exaggerate cultural wholeness, boundedness, and internal coherence
and uses this framework to read discursive behavior.) In contrast, most contem-
porary work in sociocultural and linguistic anthropology tries to pry apart such
data points and appreciate the disjunctures. In linguistic anthropology, one follows
this methodology in part by distinguishing among types of reflexive activities and
by situating these reflexive activities in social space (Agha 2007) – which includes
detailing the institutional sites in which reflexive events occur (Silverstein 1998), the
communicative media and modalities used, the categories of social actor involved,
the stakes and fallout of such encounters. Rather than explain discursive behavior
by fashioning synoptic, view-from-nowhere portraits of culturally defined moral
systems, to leap, in other words, from discourse to the abstraction of ‘culture’ – as
if the latter were an independent variable – contemporary anthropology aspires
toward processual accounts of cultural production and circulation.
This problem never even arises in strongly culturalist-styled arguments on
politeness, because they tend to treat group-relative moralities as if they were auto-
matically expressed and reflected in discursive behavior, and tend to speak as if
participants effortlessly noticed all this. Provenance and perception get conflated,
in the sense that one fails to distinguish between practices that may have arisen
once-upon-a-time out of ‘ethical’ considerations and those practices whose ethics
are perceived, if only tacitly, as ‘ethical’ in real-time interaction. In Bailey’s work
on service encounters, we wonder, to what extent did the Korean storeowners and
their clients really feel that communicative taciturnity was culturally ethical – that
it instantiated morally inflected norms and perhaps even venerable Buddhist and
Confucian ideals? Or was it just that the ethnometapragmatic notion of nunch’i
(‘perceptiveness’) surfaced during an interview and was then grafted back onto the
service encounters, where it was assumed to have served as a heuristic – a way for
participants (and analysts) to make sense of ‘taciturnicity’? The whole problem of
how some among the many cultural presuppositions become relevant in interaction
tends to get neglected in strongly culturalist readings. Methodological difficulties
aside, the basic hermeneutic is clear: politeness behavior in interaction is read by
tracing it back to a monolithically imagined culture.
Deep routes of ‘dialogue’: Downward reductions, ritual entanglements

If, for some culturalists, ethics is ferried into interaction from without, as we can
see from some work on politeness, others find ethics by delving below the surface.
Through a type of downward reduction interaction’s ethics is discovered below,
such as in our biological inheritance. Research in psychology, primatology, and
biological anthropology has found ontogenetic and phylogenetic evidence for
what many consider to be ethical predispositions in humans. Tomasello (2009),
for instance, has drawn attention to altruistic and cooperative behavior in humans
that does not appear to be shared by our nearest primate relatives. Only humans,
for example, seem to inform each another altruistically, such as by referring to
things in the environment through pointing gestures (Tomasello 2008, 2009; Call
and Tomasello 2007). Chimps sometimes do what looks like a deictic, finger-
pointing gesture when they interact with other apes, but, unlike humans, they
point only as a directive, not to help other apes find things. Ontogenetically,
between the ages of 14 and 18 months, human infants have been shown to act
helpfully (e.g. spontaneously picking up things that were dropped), and they do
this not just with primary caregivers but also with strangers. For humans, recall,
again, how even voicing a need or desire is often enough to spur others to action
(Tomasello 2009: 6–13).
The question here – and it is not one that Tomasello addresses – is that of how
these rudimentary and perhaps even hardwired habits ‘inform,’ ‘motivate,’ ‘afford,’
‘structure,’ ‘condition’ ethical behavior, reflection, and discourse. (I enclose these
terms in scare quotes to flag the way they suggest different architectures of ethical
development, despite the fact that these are seldom elucidated.) A cooperative
predisposition may be necessary for something we would want to call ethics, but
it isn’t sufficient, and we need to specify what more is needed, how we get from such
elementary predispositions to full-fledged ‘ethics,’ and what relations obtain among
these levels (see Keane n.d.). Even if we grant that a domain such as the biological
Lempert 383
is constitutive of ethics in some respect or capacity, this tells us nothing specific

about the relation between this constitutive ethics and second-order manifestations
of ethical behavior and reflection, including institutionalized moralities inscribed in
normative discourses and inculcated, for example, through language socialization.
Cross-level relations are often far more orderly than a mere undifferentiated
entanglement or enmeshment (cf. Ingold 2008, 2010) of ethics and discourse, and
these relations are often produced through semiotic processes that merit analysis.
A vivid example of this orderliness – and the need to study it with more care –
can be seen in the influential work of Jürgen Habermas, who argued for the imma-
nence of ethics in dialogic interaction and tried to ground this ethics in universal
pragmatic presuppositions. In critically revisiting claims from works like his Theory
of Communicative Action (1984), we will see how Habermas unwittingly relied on
some of the same methods used to ‘ritualize’ interaction. This is a telling reliance,
because, as I will then suggest, cases of ritualization – to caption it crudely –
illustrate well how invocations of ethics in practice involve cross-domain entangle-
ments rather than immanence, even if the impression of ethical ‘immanence’ is one
of the ritual effects.
Habermas defended the Enlightenment faculty of rationality against a league of

critics, but first he had to rework it. He re-imagined this hallowed faculty as a
capacity for dialogic communication in which humans seek consensus on criticiz-
able validity claims, claims not just about the ‘true’ but also the ‘good’ (the domain
of ethics) and the ‘beautiful’ (the domain of esthetics). For Habermas communi-
cative rationality could be seen in everything from everyday disputes to formal
debates, but it was all said to stem from a small bundle of underlying pragmatic
presuppositions called the ‘ideal speech situation’. This bundle was not the result of
nurture but rather a universal, species-level competence – a claim that amounts to a
downward reduction of sorts, though not one made in evolutionary and biological
terms. This bundle of expectations supplies speakers with a kind of tacit ethics of
communication, an ethics that also smuggled in, as we shall see, morally inflected
liberal-democratic ideals such as autonomy, rights, disinterestedness, and civility.
Liberal ideals and the ideal speech situation converge, for it was in this very con-
vergence that Habermas could make it seem as if liberal ideals were natural out-
growths of instincts about how we ought to communicate.
Habermas never meant the ideal speech situation as rules or constraints on
discursive behavior but rather as counterfactual expectations that are orthogonal
to the way people actually talk. His argument resembled that of philosopher of
language H.P. Grice (1975). Grice posited a ‘cooperative principle’ that human
actors presume whenever they engage in rational and efficient communication.
Under this principle were ‘maxims’ of Quantity, Quality, Relation and Manner.
The ‘Manner’ maxim, for instance, dictates ‘be perspicuous’. When flouted – and it
frequently is, because maxims are not rules for or constraints on behavior – the
violation attracts attention and triggers inferences (called ‘implicatures’) that invite
hearers to move from ‘what is said’ to ‘what is done’. If you choose to be ‘vague’ or
‘ambiguous’ you prompt hearers to fish for the intention of your departure from
expectations; the floutings are said to be recognized as floutings and used to ferret
out intentions. Despite protests from anthropologists who have argued otherwise,
Grice insisted that his cooperative principle had no positive cultural content, that it
shouldn’t be confused with, say, ‘helpfulness’ or ‘altruism’. Habermas, too, was
keen to keep his core pragmatic presuppositions pristine and insulated from
culture. He didn’t succeed in this, and couldn’t, because if he did then he would
not have then been able to argue that liberal-democratic ideals were inscribed in
tacit presuppositions that inform discursive practice. Through what may seem like
a semiotic sleight-of-hand, Habermas ended up investing the ideal speech situation
with cultural and ideological value.
It is instructive to recall how he did this. Habermas argued that the ideal speech
situation’s cardinal principle was symmetry – symmetry, for instance, in terms of
the speech acts we carry out, the roles we inhabit when we interact, even the telos of
the dialogic event – the shared goal being to arrive at intersubjective consensus.
Instincts dictate that everyone should enjoy being speaker and shouldn’t be stuck in
the role of hearer, for example. And no one type of speech act ought to be allowed
for some but disallowed for others.
Why symmetry? Habermas never tells us why, but it hardly takes a semiotician
to see that mutually reinforcing symmetries might help project ‘equivalences’
between actors, which, in turn, can invite us to imagine them as ‘equals,’ perhaps
even possessed of individual ‘equality’ and ‘rights’. Act out these symmetries in
interaction and the ideal speech situation supplies iconic backing for liberal-
democratic principles, so that Habermas, in effect, could bolster Western liberal
institutions from below, as if these were not ‘mere’ contingent institutions belong-
ing to the West. From the early 1980s Habermas extended his reflections on com-
municative rationality into ‘discourse ethics’. He rejected the monological Kantian
exercise of the categorical imperative, where one deliberates in solitude about
which norms are generalizable to all, in favor of a dialogical exercise of argumen-
tation, where one wrangles with others over competing normative claims
(Habermas 1995, 1999; for a useful critique, see Ferrara 1990).
What Habermas did is not unlike what’s involved in designing a ritual, where
‘poetics’ matters crucially. As the semiotic and linguistic anthropological literature
has shown, emergent poetic structures in discursive interaction, especially ritualized
interaction, can help figurate social relations and imbue them with value. In the
spirit of the Russian Formalist literary critics, Jakobson (1960: 356) defined the
‘poetic function’ as the foregrounding of message form, a ‘focus on the message for
its own sake’. (Think of how rhyme elevates form over content.) Poetic structure
may be most salient in the world’s metrical poetries, but forms of felt repetition and
parallelism crop up in all kinds of discourse, from nursery rhymes to spells to
conversational talk (see Fleming and Lempert, in press). Poetic structures can
function reflexively in discourse, helping parse the stream of speech into like-
and-unlike units that can then motivate pragmatic effects. In ritual contexts,
dense cross-modal poetic structures typically serve as scaffolding for the
Lempert 385
construction of intricate diagrams of social and cultural order, including those that
exhibit moral ideals.
For example, in Urban’s (1990) discussions of South American ceremonial dia-
logues, poetic patterns of repetition and symmetry helped participants act out a
cultural ideology of solidarity. Of the Shokleng origin-telling myth style of cere-
monial dialogue termed wãñekle`n, Urban (1990: 101–2) described how
. . . two men sit opposite one another in the middle of the plaza, their legs entwined.. . .
One interlocutor leads, uttering the first syllable of the origin myth. The respondent
repeats that syllable, after which the first speaker utters the second syllable, and so
forth, in rapid-fire succession. Speakers move their heads and upper torsos rhythmic-
ally in time with the syllables, which are shouted with extreme laryngeal and pharyn-
geal constriction.
Rituals like this invite participants to act out the desired action, as if through
pantomime (Silverstein 2003b). Through a superabundance of mutually reinforcing
signs –discursive, prosodic, bodily – participants trace out a diagram of what the
ritual as a whole hopes to effectuate. Shokleng speakers, in effect, enact a multi-
dimensional ‘model of and for coordination more generally, this coordination in
turn representing a fundamental building block of social solidarity’ (Urban 1990:
106). The cross-modal poetics of this dialogic ritual helps speakers materialize and
publicly exhibit cultural ideals, and some take this to be a characteristic of ritual in
general. In a recent review Stasch (2011: 162) aptly notes that ritual ‘intensifies
features common to human activity at large’ and is hence parasitic on ‘ordinary’
interaction. Ritual reflexively foregrounds and caricatures lower-order features of
communication and relies on the poetic function to do this.
So observe the fate of largely tacit, everyday interactional patterns, like the way
humans ‘ordinarily’ swap speaker and hearer roles when they converse. These
regularities undergo moralization as they are foregrounded, stylized, and incorpo-
rated into an extra-ordinary ritual genre. Ritualization is one way (not the only
way, to be sure) in which everyday communicative behavior can be sourced and
repurposed. The reflexive sourcing of everyday interaction here creates an entangle-
ment in which distinct orders are thereby distinguished, orders that now seem to
rest on a foundation of ‘ordinary’ interaction.
It’s important to trace out these entanglements. In Ordinary Ethics, Lambek
(2010: 3) writes that the volume’s ‘focus is less on special cases, unusual circum-
stances, new horizons, professional rationalizations, or contested forms of author-
ization than on everyday comportment and understanding’. Such matters are
sometimes broached, but ‘precisely to show how they are drawn into or drawn
from the ordinary’ (2010: 3). In this case of dialogic ritualization, we can say what
it means to be ‘drawn from the ordinary’. Lower-order patterns of discursive-
interactional ‘symmetry’ (e.g. the reciprocal, metricalized alternation of
participant-role inhabitance across turns of talk), which may be informed by
their own normativity, are transfigured into a second-order moral diagram of
social relations. Through this foregrounding of ‘ordinary’ interactional normativ-

ities, a second-order institutionalized morality can then be made public, made
recognizable to others.10
Returning to Habermas, he concealed the labor by which he created the impres-
sion of liberal immanence in dialogic interaction. In one moment he teased out
pragmatic presuppositions from below interaction, painstakingly separating this
stratum from a surface world of actual dialogue in which the light of liberal
ideals spreads. In the next moment he flattened the two worlds, making it seem as
if liberal ideals were immanent in these tacit heuristics – a naturalizing move central
to his argument’s persuasive force. This is not unlike the way strong culturalists
create and then collapse levels of analysis by exaggerating the convergence across
data points, so that they end up seeing discursive behavior like politeness as shadows
cast by culture. This is not unlike the way some interactionists narrow and perime-
terize the interaction order till they can seem to derive morality from within it and
not bother with entanglements at all. This is not unlike the way some track ethics to
biologically-based cooperative and altruistic predispositions, then leave us stranded
there, so that we cannot find our way back. Neglected in each case, mutatis mutandis,
are the specific entanglements of the ethical in relation to everyday discursive prac-
tice and the means through which entanglements are created. Merely dropping a
purified domain-based view of ethics and embracing its allegedly messy entangle-
ments – a view that revels in rather than explains the way ethics is caught up in this
and that – will not do, since these entanglements have empirical specificity that can
be analytically reconstructed. The specificity of this entanglement should be nar-
rated, and theorized, in any anthropology of ethics, ordinary or not.
As public rituals that deviate from the everyday, practices like South American
ceremonial dialogues are anything but ordinary, so why include them here? The
reason for considering strongly ritualized interactions is that they illustrate well one
kind of ethical entanglement and hint at the existence of many others. The larger
point is that we should take care when segregating ordinary ethics not to sever the
entanglements that make it seem quotidian in the first place. Discursive practice
may seem ‘small,’ ‘everyday,’ ‘tacit,’ and so on – there’s no denying that, that’s how
participants themselves often feel – but those are practical accomplishments that
need explanation. Ordinary ethics is at its best when it expands the range of behav-
iors that can serve as sites for ethical practice and when it encourages us to look
across them, not when it hardens dichotomies of small and large, micro and macro,
implicit and explicit, and makes it seem like we have to choose.
Might it be a symptom of such dichotomies that explanations of ethical
entanglements often seem thin and wooden? Das (2012: 138), for example, some-
times says that dramatic enactments of ethical value – as in public rituals – are
‘grounded within the normative practices of everyday life,’ but one isn’t entirely
sure what this grounding entails. Bergmann (1998: 283) uses ‘proto-morality’ for
underlying universals of interaction that serve as ‘preconditions’ for morality but
are not themselves fully-formed morality, but how exactly does one move from
proto-morality to morality, and should we expect the same for all species of
Lempert 387
moralization, from enactments of virtue to moral deliberation? These examples

could be multiplied, and they are meant only as a reminder of what should be
apparent, that there are many conceivable ethical entanglements and that we have
at our disposal a wealth of explanatory resources, from causal logics to the eco-
logical notion of ‘affordance’ (Gibson 1979) to the semiotic notion of ‘motivation’.
While some may want to settle how moralities arise and are distributed across our
disciplined objects of knowledge and domains of study, we should pause and treat
ethical practice and its entanglements with more care.
‘Where is the ethical located?’ asks Lambek (2010: 39) in the lead line of his essay,
‘Toward an Ethics of the Act’. Musings on the where of ethics can lead us astray.
More than where is the question of when, and how. Apart from moral breakdowns
and self-conscious deliberation and the histrionics of public ritual, it is not always
clear how ethics even matters for interactants (cf. Keane 2011: 169). It takes labor to
make ethics matter in discursive practice, and this labor frequently results in
entanglements, such that ethics cannot be said to be located anywhere in particular.
And yet the chimera of an immanent ethics, of an ethics always already being
there – or at least being traceable to some determinate source – remains. It remains
both an allure and obstacle for ordinary ethics. Perhaps this immanence is the
product of a certain imaginary that is preoccupied with the hoary question of
where ethics comes from, nature or nurture, a transcendent God or contingent
custom. Perhaps it is the result of antinomies that set the unreflective immediacy
of ‘practice’ against self-conscious ‘reflection’. Perhaps this immanence is even
aspirational, in the sense that, as ethical subjects-in-becoming (Faubion 2011), it
surfaces especially when we exaggerate, for purposes of self-cultivation, the breadth
and depth and fluency of our own present moral grounding. Whatever the tangle of
motivations may be, the ‘ordinary’ in ordinary ethics should not beguile us with its
achieved immanence but inspire us to study the communicative methods and labor –
discreet to dramatic, implicit to explicit, improvised to institutionalized – through
which actors make ethics recognizable and effective in discursive interaction.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Webb Keane and Charles Zuckerman for sharp comments, to the doctoral stu-
dents who participated in a characteristically spirited session of our Linguistic Anthropology
Lab at the University of Michigan, to Ann Rawls for fielding questions, and, last but not
least, to Anthropological Theory’s astute reviewers and editors Jonathan Friedman and Joel
Robbins, who pushed me to hone and clarify my argument.
Notes
1. ‘Everyday’ and ‘ordinary’ do not seem carefully distinguished in this literature, and, for
good or ill, I continue this tendency here. I do not present an intellectual genealogy of this
volume and related work nor do I tease out the differences among its contributors. My
point here is only that ‘ordinary’ is meant to resonate (inter alia) with ordinary language
philosophy, to which a few of the authors, such as Das, appeal.
2. Conversation analysis classes these as ‘dispreferred’ responses (for introductions, see

Schegloff [2007] and Sidnell [2010]).
3. Lambek (2010) and his contributors tend to use ‘ethics’ and ‘morality’ interchangeably,
and I do the same here. Whatever status we may wish to grant to such ‘ordinary ethics’ in
discourse, it should be plain that this ethics need not be hitched to any religious
framework.
4. I uncritically perimeterize interaction here, as if interaction were spatiotemporally
bounded and scaled (viz. ‘micro’) into a sui generis ‘order’ (Goffman 1983). I have
argued elsewhere that interaction has no intrinsic scale and that ‘scale’ is more usefully
viewed as an emergent dimension of sociospatial practice that may be gradiently and
variously institutionalized (Lempert 2012c).
5. The very opposition here between ethics in everyday face-to-face interaction on the one
hand and institutionalized moralities on the other is likely an artifact of the way inter-
action was hived off as an autonomous object of knowledge in opposition to mainstream
‘macro’-sociology.
6. I use the term ‘moralization’ as an empirical placeholder rather than narrow it prema-
turely to follow virtue ethics or deontology or consequentialism or some other approach
familiar in the philosophical literature. In these studies the acts of reflexivity seem trained
on normativities of what conversation analysts broadly call ‘sequence organization,’ by
which is meant all the unstated oughts that guide our sense of which actions should
ordinarily follow other actions. ‘First’ interactional moves like an ‘offer,’ for instance,
make conditionally relevant certain ‘second’ moves, namely, that of ‘acceptance’ or ‘dec-
lination’ (Schegloff 2007).
7. It should be recalled that phenomena such as speech dysfluencies and marked pauses can
and frequently are treated as ‘responses to’ and even ‘commentaries on’ prior inter-
actional moves. Such behaviors are not themselves meta-signs but can function reflexively
when construed as responses; as such, marked pauses or dysfluencies can be understood
to index that some prior speech behavior is (for example) ‘inappropriate’ in some respect
and this indexicality may work in concert with reflexive activity that does involve explicit
description or characterization (on varieties of reflexivity and their co-occurrence, see
especially Agha 2007).
8. In a review of the indirectness literature (Lempert 2012b), I distinguish ‘indirect perfor-
mativity,’ where the act is made deliberately opaque, from ‘indirect addressivity,’ where
the action is clear but the actors are not – in the sense that one acts through additional
layers of mediation so that one’s role is partially or wholly effaced. With indirect per-
formativity one purposely effaces what is being done to whom; with indirect addressivity
one effaces who is doing what to whom. These are not distinct kinds of indirectness,
because they often co-occur in different ratios within a single discursive practice.
9. ‘Entanglement’ is an analytic trope that appears in several literatures and is often used to
dissolve certain ontological antinomies, such as those that separate subject and object or
humans and the material world, and it is sometimes used to trouble the very sense of a
world made of discrete, circumscribed beings who ‘relate’ to one another ‘in’ some envir-
onment. Ingold (2008: 1806), for instance, writes that ‘every organism – indeed, every
thing – is itself an entanglement, a tissue of knots whose constituent strands, as they
become tied up with other strands, in other bundles, make up the meshwork’. My use of
the term is more limited. I borrow it especially for its corrosive effects on disciplinary
allocations of the ethical to specific domains, such as the cultural, the biological, the
Lempert 389
interactional – allocations that distract us from studying the in-principle boundless

possibilities of cross-domain relations. On occasion in this essay I also gesture toward
the distinct but related notion of ‘assemblage,’ with deference especially to the actor-
network-theory work of Latour (2005).
10. For simplicity I have maintained a sharp divide between ritual text and its social and
cultural surround, but I have argued elsewhere (Lempert 2012a) for a more distributed
perspective on ritual performativity. More also could be said about the bidirectionality
of influence. In ritually treating everyday dialogic behavior (e.g. turn-taking in non-
ritual conversation) as a default, dialogic rituals can remotivate and naturalize this
lower-order dialogic normativity, reaffirming the ordinary as ‘ordinary’. Finally, there
is arguably nothing surprising about the way reflexivity can generate distinct, lami-
nated ‘orders’ of experience (see Silverstein 2003a). About morality in marketplace
transactions, for instance, Keane (2008) notes how it isn’t unusual for frustrated or
scheming participants to invoke norms of ‘ordinary,’ non-marketplace interactional
etiquette.
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Michael Lempert is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at

the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. He is the author of Discipline and
Debate: The Language of Violence in a Tibetan Buddhist Monastery (2012) and
co-author (with Michael Silverstein) of Creatures of Politics: Media, Message,
and the American Presidency (2012).

LEMPERT, M. No Ordinary Ethics

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In Michael Lambek’s (2010) provocative volume Ordinary Ethics, ‘ordinary’ means

institutionalized discourses, such as codes of bioethics and religious conduct. It

that ‘moral character is constituted through the descriptive practices associated

1. Is morality immanent ‘in’ interaction?

which, at their most sweeping, include heuristics – tacit Gricean-style rules-of-

2. Ethical entanglement, not immanence

Cultural routes of ‘politeness’ in interaction

Deep routes of ‘dialogue’: Downward reductions, ritual entanglements

is constitutive of ethics in some respect or capacity, this tells us nothing speciﬁc

Habermas defended the Enlightenment faculty of rationality against a league of

social relations. Through this foregrounding of ‘ordinary’ interactional normativ-

moralization, from enactments of virtue to moral deliberation? These examples

2. Conversation analysis classes these as ‘dispreferred’ responses (for introductions, see

interactional – allocations that distract us from studying the in-principle boundless

Mondada L and Steensig J (eds) The Morality of Knowledge in Conversation. Cambridge:

Michael Lempert is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at

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