Local Ethics: A West African Case Study

Peter Mark (Wesleyan University)

 

Abstract

This talk presents a study of ethics in local, small-scale societies along the West African coast from Senegal south through Guiné-Bissau, Guinea and Sierra Leone. How can one study ethics in a society whose culture is oral, not written? Is it possible to write a history of local ethics? What sources are available for both an indigenous and an outside perspective? Ethical principles are too often subsumed under social organization or economic practice. I seek to place ethics and ethical models at the center of my analysis.

 

What role have local ethical principles played in the attraction of Islam and Christianity? Does »conversion« entail a radical break in ethical norms and moral codes? Or were these world religions attractive precisely to the degree that they mirrored pre-existing local precepts?

 

Finally – and this part of my presentation is only adumbrated, that is, it is very much a work-in-progress: can Western moral philosophy aid in the understanding and analysis of local West African ethics? Or, to the contrary, do local ethics illuminate limitations, due to the culturally contextualized nature, of modern moral philosophy as articulated by such figures as Husserl, Bergson, or Ricœur?

Redner

Peter A. Mark is Professor emeritus of Art History at Wesleyan University. His work focuses on the cultural history of West Africa and European-African Interaction from the 16th to the 19th century. At present, he is a fellow at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften at the invitation of Roland Hardenberg, Director of the Frobenius Institute for Research in Cultural Anthropology at Goethe University; he is collaborating with researchers from Goethe University's interdisciplinary field of potential »Religion and De:Toxification (RelTox)«.