ABSTRACT

What can we learn about values and how they shape sociality by looking at a murder? In this article, I look closer at the different and conflicting values involved in the social events leading up to an accidental killing of an outside visitor to a village in the northern highlands of the Philippines. I examine how these values were inherently instable and how this instability contributed to the precarious unfolding of sociality that took place before, during and after the murder. I situate the murder within a dynamic sociality that includes both humans and spirits and which operates as a continuously shifting form of relational configurations. This sociality, I argue, is given shape, although not necessarily order, by context-specific heterogeneous actualisations of values, including tradition and autonomy. Against claims that values exist most forcefully and tangibly in social life when they are realised in full, I argue that events such as the murder case, show us that values shape sociality just as forcefully, if not more, when they are actualised in practice and then run up against other differently actualised values.

摘要

我们可以从价值观中学到什么，以及如何看待谋杀案如何塑造社会价值？在本文中，我仔细观察了社会事件所涉及的不同和相互冲突的价值，这些事件导致意外杀害菲律宾北部高原的一个村庄的外来游客。我研究了这些价值观在本质上是如何不稳定的，以及这种不稳定如何导致谋杀发生之前，之中和之后社会不稳定的发展。我将谋杀案置于一个动态的社会中，该社会既包括人类，也包括精神，并且以不断变化的关系形态形式运作。我认为，这种社会性是通过特定于上下文的价值的异类实现（包括传统和自治）来塑造的，尽管不一定是有序的。