Making moral selves through comparison: Narratives of moral decline and the modern virtuous self among middle-class older adults in Nepal

IF 1.3 4区 社会学 Q3 ANTHROPOLOGY
Ethos Pub Date : 2025-04-08 DOI:10.1111/etho.70005
Paola Tinè
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Abstract

During fieldwork among older adults in middle-class families in the city of Bhaktapur (2018–2019), I recurrently came across comparative narratives of moral decline, depicting a stark contrast between the present time and a mythical past where ageing parents were treated “as gods.” In this paper, I analyze how, through acts of comparisons involving the weighing of opportunities between the past and the present and between difficulties facing parents and children, older people define their “moralities of expectation,” through which intimate politics of giving and taking are weighed against perceptions of hardship in the context of precarious middle-class livelihoods. I suggest that comparison functions as a social practice with epistemological and affective connotations and that by comparing with real and imagined others, older people validate themselves as virtuous by anchoring to fluid and ever-changing social systems. Ultimately, these findings shed light on how moral selfhoods are shaped through comparison with models of the past and the present, revealing how it is in this careful and purposeful evaluation of one's own behavior and that of others that social change is negotiated and the broader ethos revised.

Abstract Image

通过比较塑造道德自我:尼泊尔中产阶级老年人道德衰落与现代道德自我的叙事
在巴克塔普尔市(Bhaktapur)对中产阶级家庭的老年人进行实地调查期间(2018-2019年),我经常看到道德衰退的比较叙述,描绘了现在和神话般的过去之间的鲜明对比,在过去,年迈的父母被视为“神”。在本文中,我分析了老年人如何通过比较过去和现在之间的机会,以及父母和孩子面临的困难之间的权衡,来定义他们的“期望道德”,通过这种行为,在中产阶级不稳定的生计背景下,给予和索取的亲密政治与对困难的看法进行权衡。我认为,比较是一种具有认识论和情感内涵的社会实践,通过与真实的和想象的他人进行比较,老年人通过锚定流动和不断变化的社会系统来验证自己的美德。最终,这些发现通过与过去和现在的模型的比较,揭示了道德自我是如何形成的,揭示了如何在对自己和他人的行为进行仔细和有目的的评估的过程中,社会变革得以协商,更广泛的精神气质得以修订。
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来源期刊
Ethos
Ethos Multiple-
CiteScore
1.20
自引率
16.70%
发文量
46
期刊介绍: Ethos is an interdisciplinary and international quarterly journal devoted to scholarly articles dealing with the interrelationships between the individual and the sociocultural milieu, between the psychological disciplines and the social disciplines. The journal publishes work from a wide spectrum of research perspectives. Recent issues, for example, include papers on religion and ritual, medical practice, child development, family relationships, interactional dynamics, history and subjectivity, feminist approaches, emotion, cognitive modeling and cultural belief systems. Methodologies range from analyses of language and discourse, to ethnographic and historical interpretations, to experimental treatments and cross-cultural comparisons.
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