On the Road to Environmental Change

It was late on the morning of the first day of the Dialogue Journey, a fifty-day trek through the foothills of Kerala, India's Western Ghats to raise awareness about environmental degradation. There were about forty of us, stretched out along the side of the road in twos and threes, keeping up steady conversation as we walked. Some of the younger participants stopped to buy snacks at a little shop beside the road. Soon, the twos and threes were drawing together as foil packages of cookies were passed from hand to hand.

"Hey! One second!" Ali called out, coming back from the front of the march. He clapped his hands several times. Everyone stopped and turned toward him. As he made his way to the rear, a ring formed around him, blocking the road. Looking from one person to another, Ali said that the cookie eating needed to stop. He stammered a bit as he spoke, but no one cut in; there was no more chatter, no laughter, no crinkling foil.

"I have seen many people here, even in environmentalist camps, saying all kinds of things about avoiding this kind of food. You've told me yourselves!!!...And yet you, all along this road, you are eating this stuff, eating sweets and walking along like this. All that has got to stop right now!"

"Okay, okay." murmured Nishant, but Ali kept on.

"It's because they see you doing it that the kids are doing it! Now these kids that never used to eat this stuff are starting up! So don't you make these kids bad! Us adults already don't

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have good habits anyway; we're hopeless. So it's for the children! What we are doing here is trying to bring the little children along in a certain way. So if this is how we act, how is that right? If we lead them down that road? If you stop all this right now, that will be good."

"Okay, okay, okay, okay," said Nishant, wobbling his head affirmatively as Ali returned to the front of the group.

"There are plenty of cashew apples around," Ali called back over his shoulder, "Go ahead and eat those!"

"Okay, okay."

"They are just children, aren't they?" offered one mother with a small laugh.

"It's not the kids—it's you!" Ali cried, loud enough for all to hear, "It's not right to scold children!"

And with that, the journey began again. The bulk of the group moved ahead and gradually stretched out along the edge of the road. But some hung back for another bite. The remaining packages of cookies drifted toward the very rear of the group.

***

What had just happened to cookie eating? During fieldwork, Sunil and I were often on alert for moments like these, in which seemingly trivial aspects of social life were suddenly made to matter in new ways. We paid attention partly because this is what the pursuit of environmental justice seemed to be about; activists were perpetually engaged in denying values held by those around them while also asserting the goodness or badness of things, like baked goods, that were not usually evaluated in such ways. This was the explicit mission of the Dialogue Journey—to use techniques of conversation to reorient the values of farmers in Kerala's ecologically fragile rainforests. But Sunil and I also paid attention for a more prosaic reason: we were anxious not to

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get caught. The activists' concern with contesting the boundaries between the ethical and the nonethical made it difficult to know what might, in any given interaction, be invested with great moral import. Thus, we watched closely so as to watch our step, struggling to keep abreast of what had become an ethical matter and what was still just a snack.

How do we know ethics when we see it? This is not only a problem for studies of activist ethics. As others have noted, clarifying the boundaries of the moral domain has been a challenge for the anthropology of ethics as well (Cassaniti & Hickman, 2014). In recent years,

anthropologists have turned up all sorts of new moral and ethical things—not only values and codes, but moods and emotions, existential breakdowns, experiences, narratives, freedoms, and epochs. "Moral" and "ethical" have become very productive qualifiers, but what is it that makes all of these moral and ethical things deserving of the name? Responding to this problem, some have argued that stricter analytic boundaries must be drawn, so as to prevent ethics from

encompassing everything (Beldo, 2014; Shweder & Menon, 2014). Others have argued that such approaches are likely to be overly narrow and have suggested that ethics is there to be found in every social act (Lambek, 2010; Merlan, 2010; Zigon & Throop, 2014). As with environmental activists, so among anthropologists the boundaries of the moral domain are contentious and uncertain.

In the analysis that follows, I examine what happened to cookies on the first day of the Dialogue Journey in order to explore how anthropologists can clarify what we mean by ethics.

Not, of course, because cookies are inherently ethical things—for most people in Kerala, most of the time, cookies can be better or worse in terms of taste or healthiness, or as a marker of social status, but they are not taken as good or bad in an ethical way. Rather, what makes the cookie controversy a good ethnographic puzzle is that cookies were not obviously ethical or nonethical

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at the time. To be sure, I knew that "bakery items" could have negative valences for some Malayali environmentalists, and shortly before Ali's speech, another journeyer had complained aloud about cookie eating. But no one had paid her much attention at the time, and the snacking had carried on. What made Ali's speech notable was the shift it brought about—a slight shift, I felt, in the moral terrain. But then, how could I be sure?

Was Ali's speech a "moralization" of cookie eating (Lempert, 2013) which effectively attributed ethical import to acts that, a kilometer up the road, had not mattered in that way? The difficulty of strictly labeling Ali's speech a moralization is symptomatic of a more general indeterminacy in pinpointing when ethical evaluation is happening. Nonetheless, the cookie controversy suggests one way to partially overcome such indeterminacy: attempts by some to deny or resist Ali's seeming ethical evaluation of cookies actually made the stakes in the cookie controversy more recognizably ethical. I describe this as a stickiness—a tendency of those who disobeyed Ali to evaluate themselves with reference to Ali's evaluation even though they disagreed with that evaluation. Such stickiness of accountability may be one sign that moralization is happening. Moreover, a close analysis of the processes that rendered Ali's evaluation sticky can also bring empirical clarity to key terms in existing proposals for how to define ethics.