Ethics of Abstraction: Anonymity and Death in the Philippines

Scott MacLochlainn (Max Planck Institute, Göttingen): öffentlicher Vortrag im Rahmen des Forschungskolloquiums Ethnologie

Datum: 3. November 2020
Zeit: 16.15 Uhr bis 17.45 Uhr
Ort: per zoom

Scott MacLochlainn (Max Planck Institute, Göttingen): Ethics of Abstraction: Anonymity and Death in the Philippines

In this paper, I describe the practices of abstraction embedded in death in the Philippines—in particular with regard to the ongoing and widespread extrajudicial killings (as part of Oplan Tokhang, an ostensible war on drugs) that has dominated discourses on governance, ethics, and death in the country since 2016. I argue that the attenuation of a normative death-ethics in the country has seen death and the dead body increasingly emerge in its anonymous and abstracted forms—unnamed, unlocated, and decoupled from particular histories of meaning around death. Instead, death is often elevated to typification, stripped of it specificity. However, such abstraction is often the result of “doing good”—at the least to account and configure killings, and to attain empirical forms of truth in the face of swirling misinformation. This has enabled death to be appropriated for future, utopic, and transcendent ends that reach far past the particularities of a single death. Moreover, death and its bodies have become markers and proxies for predictive modes of state and counter-state making. To that end, I want to think not only about death in the Philippines, but also push for a greater theoretical and ethnographic engagement with the concept of “abstraction” itself.