“Lambek is an outstanding anthropologist whose work has shaped the directions of anthropological thinking, especially in the fields of religion, ethics, and spirit possession—each field inflected creatively by the other. As one reads these essays, one begins to engage not only with the evolution of Lambek’s thought but with the pivotal controversies that mark the emergence of a vigorous debate on ethics, freedom, obligation, and the making of the moral person in anthropology. Throughout we are made aware not only of the theoretical sophistication and the fidelity to the ethnographic record in Lambek’s writing but also of the fact that these ideas on ethics are not just intellectual games for him—they are ways of living and working. This collection is a truly outstanding account of the various pathways open for anthropology to think about ethics and morality.”

Veena Das, Johns Hopkins University

“Lambek has come to be identified with a distinctive position within the anthropology of ethics—one that recognizes the ethical as an imminent dimension of all human social life, that sees the human condition as necessarily and pervasively an ethical one. The argument for this position is richly developed across the essays in this collection and rooted in Lambek’s exemplary, detailed ethnography and fine readings of a distinctive range of thinkers. The result is beautifully written, scrupulous scholarship of the highest order that will be indispensible for this important and growing field of anthropology.”

James Laidlaw, University of Cambridge