Ethics of Sharing: A Situational Anthropology

Abstract

This article introduces the special issue on ethics of sharing by way of a conceptual discussion of four key terms that animate the individual contributions: sharing, ethics, situation, and presence. Turning to situational analysis to hold fast the anthropological empirical commitment, each author takes as their point of departure a detailed description of empirical sharing situations. The aim is to bring this ethnographic attention to specific situations into conversation with recent anthropological debates on ethics that resonate with the growing interest and emerging literature on sharing. In a concluding reflection on the individual contributions, the article grapples with the problem of scale and makes efforts to relate the ethics of sharing to our present human condition as cohabitants of the shared environmental life-support system of one finite planet, Earth. It is this planetary horizon, we find, that adds a new urgency to the perennial ethical question of how one ought to live: what can this shared existential situation be said to demand of us?