Introduction: Qualifying Sociality through Values

Abstract

ABSTRACT This introduction to the special issue Qualifying Sociality through Values interrogates the relationship between sociality and values, two concepts that have gained increasing traction in anthropology, but which have not previously been jointly considered. It presents the twofold agenda of the special issue which is to explore how sociality is valued and how values affect sociality. It opens up these ambiguous and morally charged concepts and discusses their utility and ethnographic purchase as tools for understanding social life in practice. The introduction also outlines the contributions and the special issue’s principal findings. Sociality is rendered as a multilaterally value-shaped and ambiguously valued situated practice which is subject to both extension and contraction. Values come out as multi-purposive evaluative criteria which operate as open-ended social resources to different effects, imparting both direction and contingency.