Deflecting responsibility

IF 0.5 4区 社会学 Q3 ANTHROPOLOGY Hau-Journal of Ethnographic Theory Pub Date : 2022-12-01 DOI:10.1086/721850
Guido Sprenger
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Abstract

While studies of responsibility have been concerned with the ways responsibility is traced to accountable human persons or institutions, the deflection of responsibility to nonhumans that are not accountable has been neglected. Such deflections may follow at least two different procedures. The Rmeet in Laos sometimes opt to deflect responsibility for wrongdoing to spirits who temporarily obfuscate a person’s intentionality. People in modern contexts, in contrast, occasionally delegate responsibility to impersonal sets of rules and laws—the “system,” the “market,” “nature.” In both cases, concepts of personhood condition the shape of the nonhumans emerging from the distribution of agency. Persons appear as forms that differentiate between actions that can be integrated into them and those that cannot. The deflection of responsibility protects personal integrity from actions incoherent with a person’s form. In particular, deflection to nonhumans removes accountability from the sphere of human influence.
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偏转的责任
虽然对责任的研究一直关注的是责任是如何追溯到负责任的人或机构的,但对不负责的非人类的责任转移却被忽视了。这种偏转可能遵循至少两种不同的程序。老挝的Rmeet有时会选择将错误行为的责任转移到暂时混淆一个人的意图的幽灵身上。相比之下,现代社会的人们偶尔会把责任委托给非个人的规则和法律——“制度”、“市场”、“自然”。在这两种情况下,人格的概念决定了从代理分配中产生的非人类的形态。人以不同的形式出现,这些形式区分了可以融入他们的行动和不能融入他们的行动。责任的转移保护了个人的完整性,使其免受与个人形式不一致的行为的影响。特别是,对非人类的转移使责任从人类的影响范围中消失。
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来源期刊
CiteScore
1.40
自引率
0.00%
发文量
31
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