Where Is the Good in the World?: Ethical Life Between Social Theory and Philosophy

Bringing together contributions from anthropology, sociology, religious studies, and philosophy, along with ethnographic case studies from diverse settings, this volume explores how different disciplinary perspectives on the good might engage with and enrich each other. The chapters examine how people realize the good in social life, exploring how ethics and values relate to forms of suffering, power and inequality, and, in doing so, demonstrate how focusing on the good enhances social theory. This is the first interdisciplinary engagement with what it means to study the good as a fundamental aspect of social life.

David Henig is Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Utrecht University. He is the author of Remaking Muslim Lives: Everyday Islam in Postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina (Illinois UP, 2020) and the co-editor of Economies of Favour After Socialism (OUP, 2017).

Anna Strhan is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of York. She is the author of The Figure of the Child in Contemporary Evangelicalism (OUP, 2019) and the co-editor of Religion and the Global City (Bloomsbury, 2017).

Joel Robbins is the Sigrid Rausing Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of numerous publications, including the books Becoming Sinners: Christianity and Moral Torment in a Papua New Guinea Society (UC Press, 2004), and Theology and the Anthropology of Christian Life (OUP, 2020).