Professor James Laidlaw
- Emeritus Professor of Social Anthropology
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About
My career in anthropology began somewhat by accident. I was admitted to read Law at King’s College, Cambridge in 1981, but the enlightened Director of Studies at that time required me to choose something else to study in the first year, on the basis purely of intellectual interest. I chose the old Archaeological and Anthropological Tripos (‘Arch & Anth’), quickly fell in love with Social Anthropology, and decided to stick with that, so I never did study law, and have had the great good fortune to remain in the Department of Social Anthropology at Cambridge ever since. Finding my PhD research topic was almost equally serendipitous: my undergraduate supervisor, Caroline Humphrey, gave me an introduction to a PhD student who was in the city of Jaipur, and my doctoral project on religion and ethics among the Jains in northern India developed from meeting her friends and contacts there. My attempts to understand Jainism, with its strikingly complex and exacting ethical thought and practice, led me to a more general interest in the question of how anthropology might better conceptualize and understand the ethical dimension of human life, and how we might develop productive dialogue with moral philosophers and others. Meanwhile, over the years, I have conducted ethnographic research in various parts of Buddhist Asia, focusing latterly on the Foguangshan (Buddha’s Light Mountain, 佛光山), a global movement promoting Humanistic Buddhism, based in Taiwan.
Research
Ethnographically, my research began in India, where fieldwork among Jain religious communities in Rajasthan and Gujarat resulted in a series of publications: The Archetypal Actions of Ritual (1994), a jointly-authored book on ritual theory; Riches and Renunciation (1995), a study of Jain religion, morality, and social life; and several articles, including ‘A Free Gift Makes No Friends’ (2000), a contribution to classic anthropological debates on the gift and exchange.
Working on Jainism led me to the view that anthropological theory (and social theory more generally) was not well equipped to comprehend the ethical dimension of human life, and that new conceptual resources were required to enable productive dialogue with moral philosophy and psychology. An invitation to deliver the Malinowski Memorial Lecture in 2001 gave me an opportunity to develop this line of thought, and from there developed my work in the anthropology of ethics. The lecture was published as ‘For an Anthropology of Ethics and Freedom’ (2002), and has been followed by a series of further publications including The Subject of Virtue: An Anthropology of Ethics and Freedom (2014), and The Cambridge Handbook for the Anthropology of Ethics (2023).
In the meantime, following participation in collaborative research projects on Buddhism in the Inner Mongolia region of China and in Bhutan, I have conducted research, mostly with my colleague Jonathan Mair, on ethical self-cultivation in the Taiwan-based, but now fast-growing global Buddhist movement, Foguangshan (Buddha’s Light Mountain, 佛光⼭).
From 2017 to 2022, I was one of the Directors of the Max-Cam Centre, a research project jointly funded by the University and the Max Planck Society, for the study of ethics, ritual and social change. The Max-Cam supported the work of a brilliant team of early career researchers, and hosted a number of workshops and conferences. Other research interests over the years have included: the relation between the anthropology of religion and cognitive science (e.g., Ritual and Memory, 2004; Religion, Anthropology, and Cognitive Science, 2007; ‘Anthropology and Cognitive Science’, 2014); and aspects of the history of anthropology (e.g., The Essential Edmund Leach, 2 volumes, 2000).
Teaching and supervision
SAN1: The comparative perspective: The Symbolic and the Real
SAN3: Anthropological theory and methods: Schools of Anthropological Theory
SAN5: Ethical life and the anthropology of the subject: Anthropology of Ethics