2010 Ethnos - Towards An Ethics of Being-With

Towards an Ethics of Being-With:
Intertwinements of Life in Post-Invasion Basra
Hayder Al-Mohammad
University of Kent at Canterbury, Canterbury, UK
Downloaded By: [University of Kent] At: 00:28 14 February 2011
abstract In this paper, I turn to Oum Hassan, a woman who works as a cleaner in a
hotel in Basra, and show that her life is as much a life for her niece and sister as it is
about maintaining her own existence in the face of tremendous pressures. Where
anthropologists have insisted on the primordiality of social relationship to the consti-
tution of personhood, I am wanting to recast some of this interest into a language
of an ethics of life and being-with.
keywords Iraq, Basra, being-with, ethics, life
he smallest number, in the strict sense, is two’. (Aristotle 1983, Physics:
‘T 2027a)
Judith Jarvis Thomson’s famous thought experiment is posed in the follow-

ing terms:
You wake up in the morning and find yourself back to back in bed with an uncon-
scious violinist. A famous unconscious violinist. He has been found to have a fatal
kidney ailment, and the Society of Music Lovers has canvassed all the available
medical records and found that you alone have the right blood type to help. They
have therefore kidnapped you, and last night the violinist’s circulatory system was
plugged into yours, so that your kidneys can be used to extract poisons from his
blood as well as your own. The director of the hospital now tells you, ‘Look, we’re
sorry the Society of Music Lovers did this to you - we would never have permitted
it if we had known. But still, they did it, and the violinist now is plugged into you.
To unplug you would be to kill him. But never mind, it’s only for nine months. By
then he will have recovered from his ailment, and can safely be unplugged from
you’. (1971:48 –9)
ethnos, vol. 75:4, december 2010 (pp. 425 –446)

# 2010 Routledge Journals, Taylor and Francis
issn 0014-1844 print/issn 1469-588x online. doi: 10.1080/00141844.2010.544394
426 hayder al-mohammad
Kafkan similarities to one side, the thought experiment is an attempt by

Thompson to highlight the inconsistencies inherent to the anti-abortionist
who claims that a foetus has the same right to ‘life’ as an adult human and
that to abort a foetus during pregnancy is an act of murder. The point of any
thought experiment is to capture and reveal the intuitions which we have on
a particular problem and to point to possible contradictions or tensions with
other positions one might hold. Hence, if one accepts that unplugging
oneself from the violinist is not an act of murder, then, by implication, one
must accept that abortion is not murder to avoid being inconsistent. This,
crudely speaking, is what Thompson is aiming to highlight.
Maybe one of the great oddities to many anthropologists is the insistence by
some philosophers on ‘coherence’ in the moral field.1 As fieldworkers, one of the
earliest insights many of us gain is that the projects that compose living are
rarely threatened by semantic and logical contradictions or tensions in beliefs
(Ewing 1998; Povinelli 2001); indeed, such inconsistencies tend to pose a
greater threat to anthropologists and their projects than the people they are
working with and researching (Al-Mohammad forthcoming). This paper
however is not about abortion, thought experiments, nor epistemic and seman-
tic inconsistencies. I want to leave these issues to the side to instead think of the
relationships between persons and to think of such relationships as ethical. I
take from Thompson’s scenario a motivation to enter into a discussion on
the imbrications of life, ethics, obligation and choice. Namely, though
persons may well be constituted only in terms of their relationships with
other persons, animals, objects, landscapes and world,2 in what sense can we,
as anthropologists, think of those relationships as ‘ethical’?
More specifically, I find something compelling in the image of two persons
being connected by a line in which life runs from one to the other and in this
paper I want to focus on particularly an ethics which takes as its concern not
which ethical criteria within a particular socio-cultural horizon are at play if
one were to ‘cut the cord’ from one life to another, but to think of that
cord – the line, the relationship, the with of being – as ethical itself.
During the last decade or so, there has been a strong move within the disci-
pline to make much more prominent issues relating to ethics and morality, both
in terms of thinking of anthropologist’s ethical obligations to their research par-
ticipants (Scheper-Hughes 1995; Battaglia 1999; Fluehr-Lobban 2002; Pels &
Meskell 2005; Castañeda 2006) and also of anthropology’s concerns with ethi-
cality, as such, in the social world (Laidlaw 2002; Lakoff & Collier 2004; Biehl
2005; Carrithers 2005; Robbins 2007; Evens 2008). Indeed, it has become quite

Towards an Ethics of Being-With 427
glib to talk of the ‘ethical turn’ with so much research and so many publications
focused on the ‘ethical’. There has also been another important movement
within anthropology, and this has been described as the ‘ontological turn’
(Henare et al. 2006). In part, this paper also attempts to point to some areas
where both ontological and ethical inquiries have important points of conver-
gence.
However, any theoretical concerns within this paper are derived from an
attempt to better understand the struggles of daily life in the city of Basra,
Iraq where I have been conducting fieldwork since 2005.3 Instead of trying to
fight through what Taussig (1986) calls the ‘epistemic murk’ to reveal underlying
logics and structures of conflict zones, I turn to one woman, Oum Hassan, and
her struggles after the invasion of Iraq of 2003 as a means to gain insight into
some of the practical, intellectual, corporeal and emotional effort that goes
into sustaining her own existence.4 Though, try as I might to limit my interest
to Oum Hassan alone I found Oum Hassan’s sister’s and niece’s lives entangled
around her own. As I try to highlight throughout the paper, Oum Hassan’s life is
as much a life for her niece and sister as it is about maintaining her own existence
in the face of tremendous pressures. Where anthropologists have insisted on the
primordiality of social relationship to the constitution of personhood, I am
wanting to recast some of this interest into a language of an ethics of life and
being-with.5
The first half of the paper attends to Oum Hassan’s work and life routine and
also the context, historical and contemporary, against and through which she
makes her way in the world. The second half of the paper points to the inter-
relationships and interdependencies of Oum Hassan, her sister and niece, and
suggests a supplement to current discussions of ethics in anthropology by
directing attention to an ethics I am calling being-with.
Oum Hassan
Oum Hassan is a cleaner in the hotel I have stayed in every trip I have been to
Basra since the summer of 2005. She cleans all the rooms, of which there are 12,
on the first floor. As I have spent many months in the hotel, room 1016 has been
allotted as mine. Oum Hassan begins work at seven in the morning and usually
leaves at four in the afternoon, working six days in the week. Between the years
of 2005 and 2008, there were few people staying at the hotel because tourism in
Basra was non-existent and there was little work to attract business people due
to the high rates of violence and kidnappings.7 Apart from the odd conference

and meetings held during this period, there were rarely any more than four or
five guests in a hotel which has more than 45 rooms.
Oum Hassan does not sleep in the afternoons, which is uncommon in Iraq as
the country closes shops during this period, and I have rarely managed to doze
off in the afternoons so she would sit in my room8 and watch television if
the electricity was working or wait with me for the electricity to return.9
Through conversations with her and what the staff in the hotel, her relatives
and neighbours working in the market in the centre of Basra would say
about Oum Hassan, it became clear that even by the standards of most Iraqis,
she was living under tremendous pressure. The story I tell below and through-
out the paper is drawn from conversations with Oum Hassan from 2005 till
September 2009.10
Let me begin with her name, ‘Oum Hassan’. ‘Oum’ in Arabic means ‘mother
of’ but Oum Hassan has never been married nor had a child of her own. As a
mark of respect for her age – she is in her late-thirties – and to avoid calling
her by her first name, it is normal practice to call a woman ‘Oum’ or a man
‘Abu’ (‘father of’) to avoid being disrespectful.11 Some of the reasons why she
never married and had children became evident at the beginning of our friend-
ship. She has a pronounced limp and slumped gait and as I found out later she
had a terrible series of encounters with doctors and had a number of failed oper-
ations early in her life. Because her family lived in the Basran countryside, most
families who wanted to marry their sons off would steer clear of a woman who
was ill and physically impaired both for practical reasons – a wife is expected to
undertake much manual labour – and because of prejudice. But when she was
in her twenties, just after the end of the Iran – Iraq war (1989), Oum Hassan said
that she was not noticeably physically impaired and her father had managed to
buy a house on the outskirts of Basra where the family moved to outside of what
she felt were the prejudices of rural, village life in Iraq. However, even after the
move, no suitors came and she remains unmarried.
Oum Hassan had two sisters and a brother. After the failed intifada of 1991,
Oum Hassan’s family was accused of being conspirators against the Ba’thist
regime with links to Iran and her 16-year-old brother was taken outside the
family home and shot several times in front of his family. Then her father
was beaten and shot dead and the bodies left behind for the sisters and their
mother to deal with. ‘No one from our family or tribe came. Nobody. They
left us women all by ourselves. My mother died a year later. Nobody showed
us rahma [mercy]’.

The years passed and the sisters managed to get by but with great difficulty.
The youngest sister was married in 1999, she was in her mid-twenties by that
time. Her husband was older than her by some years but by all accounts was
a good man and treated his wife and her family with utmost respect. After
the invasion of Iraq of 2003, the husband died in a random violent attack in
the district of khamsa-meel in Basra sometime early in 2004. The sister had a
daughter of four years old before she took her own life in the spring of 2004.
‘I have one sister left and a niece. My sister is even sicker and more tired than
I am. She stays at home. . . I work. . . Before I was a cleaner I sat on the
ground on the pavement and sold chewing-gum, lighters, anything. I needed
enough money to pay for food, water and gas. We didn’t need a lot, but
you’ve seen the prices go up, so I was lucky to get this job as a cleaner
here. . . I work for her, my niece only. . . My life is finished. I’ve had nothing
but pain and I am tired. If it wasn’t for her I would have finished’.
Oum Hassan’s is not a unique case. On the main road to the right of the
hotel, several women are dotted on the pavement, wearing their ‘abaya’
(a long, black, cloak-like dress), their faces and bodies covered with only a
cupped hand stuck out. One woman, well known to locals, had her husband
taken away one night by Saddam’s mukhabarat (secret police) during the
early-1990s, never to be seen again. She has no children and her family have
turned their backs on her and her blind sister who sits next to her on the pave-
ment. The stories of personal tragedy and suffering are endless and are not con-
fined to beggars and the poor. No family, no person in Iraq has been left
untouched by the violence of the last three decades no matter how compliant
– and complicit – they may have been with the Saddam government or the
gangs and militias that have ravaged the country after the invasion. Below I
give a brief sketch of what Basrans have endured since the invasion.
Basra and the 2003 Invasion

It is worth reminding ourselves that Iraq has been in conflict since 1980 when
the long, drawn-out dispute with Iran began which produced heavy casualties
on both sides. Basra bore the brunt of much of the war and came out of it with
its infrastructure in disarray and the city in ‘virtual destruction’ (Farouk-Sluglett
& Sluglett 1990:20). The eight-year war against Iran, however, was only a
prelude to greater conflict and turmoil. On the 2nd of August 1990, Iraq
invaded Kuwait which was subsequently annexed to the Basra Governorate.
The international community reacted sharply. On the 17th of January 1991,
the Gulf War began and ended on the 28th of February of that same year.

A short war though one which inflicted casualties from 30 to even more than
a hundred thousand according to some estimates (Finlan 2009: 85 – 6). The
sanctions imposed on Iraq from 1991 till 2003 only made things worse. The
only statistics coming out of the country were the staggering rates of infant
mortality, the data relating to the collapse of the Iraqi health system and the
mass migration rates (OECD 2000:172 – 80; Pellet 2000:185 – 200).
On the 6th of April 2003, British units entered the city of Basra. Most of the
Iraqi soldiers laid their arms down in the face of the awesome show of force
displayed in the initial air and artillery strikes against the city and returned
home tired from the years of sanctions, bombardment, fear and desperation.
Several hundred or so soldiers, reservists and members of the ruling Ba’thist
party loyal to Saddam, though, fought on, many to their deaths. The promise
of a new era for Iraq proved to be correct; it was, however, not quite the era
the allied forces had in mind.
In those days and weeks, once it was apparent that Saddam Hussein and his
Ba’thist party had been deposed from power, widespread looting occurred
across most of Iraq causing untold damage (Barakat 2005:579 – 61). Saddam
had armed and made powerful criminal gangs during the sanction years to
aide in the smuggling of goods into the country. He had also, before the
invasion, freed all criminals from prison who were now walking the streets of
Iraq (Fontan 2009:113). As soon as the Ba’thist regime was crushed, many of
these gangs, criminals and thousands of ordinary Iraqis took to the streets
and looted whatever they could get their hands on (Bensahel 2008:xxvi).
There was nothing that was off limits: banks and their deposits and government
buildings holding government records were emptied and fleeced completely,
the police station in the commercial area in Basra was emptied, the metal
railings on the roads were taken and even the metal crash barriers on the
Basra to Baghdad motorway were stolen.
Below is a picture of the Basra Sheraton in 2005 which is located on Corona-
tion Road (al-corniche) and looks out onto Shatt-al-Arab. The hotel was one of
the last things Basrans were proud of in their city because it was not decript and
till just a few weeks before the invasion the hotel was functioning adequately.
After the invasion, the looters took everything, even some of the concrete
load-bearing walls were damaged in an attempt to steal them. As you can see
from the picture, there is nothing left of the former hotel but the concrete struc-
ture. This is how efficient and total the looting was and people became wealthy
overnight from this thievery if they were armed and prepared to perpetrate
violence on others (Allawi 2007:94).12

Iraqis have given a name to the thieves and looters, ‘Hawasim’, a name
derived from Saddam’s description to the coming war at that time as
‘al-hawasim’ which means ‘the decisive War’. After the end of the war, everyone
involved in the looting and robbery is called ‘Hawasim’ (Faris 2009).
In December 2006, I was standing outside a friend’s shop in shara’ al-wata-
niya in Basra, a man walked past me into the next shop. I heard three shots,
the same man walked out of the shop with nobody uttering a word. The
shop owner had been killed and his two sons in their late-teens who worked
in the shop witnessed the killing. It turned out later that the man who was
killed was owed a few hundred dollars by the man who shot him. Instead of
paying him back the money, he killed him. This was not a typical scene in
Basra but it indicates the level of lawlessness in Basra after the invasion.
Kidnappings became commonplace and paying the ransom did not guaran-
tee the return of a loved one. Taxi drivers were targeted and still to this day in
2010 are killed for their money and car. Such crimes, and there are many more of
them, had as their sole aim to make money. There were other forms of crimes
which became prevalent after the invasion which were based on other goals.
Examples of these crimes are as follows: barbers who pluck hair with string
were killed because shi’ite militias claimed that there was a religious ruling
claiming it to be ‘haram’, i.e. profane. In the market I know of one case of

someone being killed because they had cucumbers and tomatoes in the same
bag – they are both of different grammatical genders in Arabic hence some
type of blurring of classifications had occurred, or, as a friend of mine put it:
‘the tomato and cucumber were having sex’. This story I had always believed
to be an urban legend until one day it took place in the middle of the grocers
market in Old Basra when I was sitting in a chemists talking to some friends.
The news filtered to us within minutes.
Another phenomenon which had a profound effect on Basrans after the inva-
sion was the destruction of water facilities (Al-Mohammad 2007). Simon Fradd,
a British physician who spent three months as a health adviser in Iraq, describes
his experiences in Basra during the summer of 2004 in the following terms:
A half-finished sewage treatment plant sits at the edge of the city, but construction
stopped 7 years ago. The drains that are supposed to carry human waste into the
Shat Al-Arab river are blocked. And although plans to rebuild health facilities are
getting underway, nobody had actually thought about getting this sewage off the
streets. (cited in Brown 2004:15)
Because of the increase in violence in Basra from 2004 onwards, health organ-
izations, charities and independent monitors were withdrawn from the region;
hence, we have very little data outside of anecdotal accounts of the health
situation in Basra. How Basra came to be in this state is largely accounted for
by the last three decades of war, U.N. sanctions, Saddam Hussein’s oppressive
regime and the subsequent taking over of the city by militias and gangs (Al-
Mohammad forthcoming).
A Struggling Oum Hassan

After the invasion and the deaths of her sister and brother-in-law, Oum
Hassan and her remaining sister were the sole owners of the family home. By
2009, the house she lives in was worth more than US$100,000 even though
the house is not particularly large, not in good condition and is located in
one of the poorer areas of Basra – which should give some indication of the
amount of money there is in Basra and also that demand for housing far out-
strips its supply (cf. ESCWA 2003; Romano 2005:436– 45).13 Most of the
goods of any value in the house were sold long ago to pay for essentials, so
even though Oum Hassan has capital in the form of the house, she cannot
access it and is reliant solely on her low wage as a cleaner. ‘I get by though
Hayder. It’s tough, but we get by’.

Soon after the death of her sister, Oum Hassan was visited on several
occasions by relatives. ‘They tell me that three females shouldn’t be alone in
a big house . . . it’s dangerous. Of course it is. You need a man in the house
to protect you’. The visits from relatives became more frequent. Previously
nobody from her family and tribe had even picked up the phone to ask of
her, her sister or niece, now relatives were making suggestions that Oum
Hassan should marry and that they had several possible men for her to
choose from. ‘Hayder, they want me to marry their son or brother so they
can take the house from me, sell it and throw me out onto the streets. I
would be divorced with nothing in a matter of months if not weeks’.
The pressure on Oum Hassan to marry intensified. Men arriving in pick-up
trucks were shouting threats over the wall surrounding the house. At night,
rocks would be thrown at the house to intimidate the women. The neighbours
began to ignore the family for fear of becoming embroiled in the situation. ‘If I
was alone I would marry, but I can’t, not with my niece. If we lose the house
she’s on the street and what happens then? . . . she’s finished. I spoke to some
of our relatives but they told me to marry, that a women shouldn’t live without
a man. We’re poor people, three females, who do we have to turn to? Nobody
has any interest in us, just the house. If I give in I’m not worried about me or
my sister, it’s her . . . why should she go through what I’ve lived through’.
Oum Hassan could not turn to anyone. The police had no powers and were
under the control of militias and gangs. The only viable authorities within Basra
were tribal and gang leaders with the money and power to enforce their wants
and needs. Such groups became prominent under the Saddam regime, particu-
larly after the Gulf War of 1991. Indeed, there was a veritable explosion of the
number of people claiming to be tribal leaders and groups claiming to be
tribes which Saddam was happy to recognize on the condition that these
persons and groups would be compliant with the Iraqi leader’s wants. The
explosion of tribalism was so great that Jabar notes Iraqis were referring to
the new tribal leaders as ‘chieftans made in Taiwan’14 (2003:94). Beyond the
pragmatics of employing tribes to do the work of the state apparatuses,
Saddam was claiming tribalism to have a uniting quality in which sectarian alle-
giances would give way to an ‘Iraqi’, tribal way of living (Graham-Brown 1993,
1995). One important indicator of the increasing prevalence of tribal values in
urban society in Iraq was the discernible decline in the status of women and
in the opportunities accorded to them (Davis 2005:262 – 4). The literature on
the difficulties that women in particular face in Iraq is growing in response to
the quite violent breakdown of the rights and values accorded to women in

such a very short period of time. The reasons lie in political expediency and the
turn towards nationalist and Islamist (both sunni and shi’ite) politics (cf. Al-Ali
2007; Cardosa 2007; Al-Jawaheri 2008; Pratt & Al-Ali 2009).
Oum Hassan battles her way through poverty, the weight and burden of
Iraq’s history and continual threats of violence against her and her nice. In
such struggles one cannot but be overcome by the sheer work that goes into
maintaining a life. One tends to think of life as something a priori, or given,
but in such cases one glimpses the sheer burden to maintain life and its
reciprocal reliances. There is, what I am tempted to call, the ‘labour of being’:
the physical, emotional, intellectual, practical work that goes into trying to
sustain not only our existence, but also the type[s] of existence we want to
lead. Michael Jackson talks of ‘the struggle for being’ to denote something
similar to what I am trying to capture. In his own words:
Though human existence is relational – a mode of being-in-the-world – it is conti-

nually at risk. This implies not only that our being is conditional on our interactions
. . . with the world in which we live, but that we are involved in a constant struggle to
sustain and augment our being in relation to the being of others, as well as the non-
being of the physical and material world, and the ultimate extinction of being that is
death. (2004:xiv)
I take issue with two points: first, Jackson claims that the ‘struggle’ is an aspect of
being though I would assert that ‘struggling’ is not what being does but what it
is. Hence, to reconfigurate Jackson’s terminology slightly, I am much more
interested in ‘the struggle of being’ (struggle as an ontological state) than ‘the
struggle for being’ (struggle as a predicate of being). Secondly, Jackson’s focus
is on how a being ‘augments’ itself in relation to other beings, death and the
material world, but as a being is not an entity but a being in relation to and
with others, should we not also think of ‘struggling’ as a struggling-with and
not only against?
Being-with and Ethics

This ‘struggling-with’, the way in which life is possible only through and with
other beings, tends to recede into the background of our habituated daily
engagements such that persons can come to think of themselves as separated
off from the world and others. However, in certain situations, the ‘with’ of strug-
gling, of being, can become somewhat explicit. An instance of this occurred
some weeks after the month of Ramadan and the Eid celebrations of 2007

when Oum Hassan became very ill. She was pale, damp and clammy from a
fever and was not eating. The first few days the hotel staff and I kept asking
her if she was fine, if she needed anything and also insisting she go to the
doctor. She would smile embarrassed from all the attention and claimed all
was well. One day I returned to the hotel and was rushed by Abu Ahmed
and Ammar, two workers from the hotel’s restaurant. ‘Oum Hassan is in a
bad way, she can’t stand-up . . . the doctor is with her now’. She had collapsed
and been found by one of the hotel guests who had carried her to his room.
When I saw her she was sitting in a chair crying, apologizing to the hotel
manager, Abu Mustafa, for the trouble she caused and said she would be fine
and be back to work as normal by the next morning.
The doctor who had been called in refused to take any payment and came
back every day to the hotel to check on Oum Hassan who would not stay at
home because she was scared she would lose her job. Those weeks during the
worst of her sickness – she had a severe case of pneumonia – everyone in the
hotel cleaned the first floor every day so that the hotel owner would not discover
that Oum Hassan was sick and could not work, which in all likelihood would
have resulted in her being fired, or at least her wages being docked.
Others outside the hotel wanted to help Oum Hassan as well. The shop
owner at the corner of the hotel came to see Oum Hassan and offered to do
her daily shopping. She tried to refuse but every afternoon he delivered a bag
of groceries to the hotel for her. As I worked in a pharmacy and most of my
friends were either pharmacists or worked in pharmacies, I looked after the
medicine side of things. Shop owners down the hotel’s street and the main
road would ask of Oum Hassan, and they would give me small gifts for her
niece or fruit for her to take home. I told them she was being looked after,
but they insisted; it was important that she knew people wished her well, one
of them said.
I do not want to paint a romantic picture of a community spontaneously
coming together to care for Oum Hassan, but during her illness, those relation-
ships and acquaintanceships built through years of barely perceptible social
engagement became manifest. I went to drink tea with Abu Mustafa and
several of the hotel workers during an evening. In the midst of the conversa-
tions, I remember Abu Mustafa saying the following:
What little we have we give to someone who needs it. The big things such as tribes,
militias, murders, we’re all on our own for that. . . At work we fight with each other
every day, then we make up, then we fight again. It doesn’t matter if you’re a nice

person or a bad person, we’re living together sharing our problems with each other.
That is why we have to try to be as helpful to Oum Hassan as we can. She’s one of us.
These years of working together, they’re not nothing. . . A stray dog in your neigh-
bourhood, even after months of its barking waking you up at night, your heart
breaks if you see its leg broken because a car ran over it.
Abu Mustafa’s sentiments were echoed by the others listening to the conversa-
tion. Living with and amongst persons and other beings, in spite of what one
might feel towards them, creates bonds of care and interest. This togetherness
of lives, interests, ways of being and even bodily health and integrity in Oum
Hassan’s case is what I am trying to pick out with the term ‘being-with’.
Many anthropologists, of course, have maintained the primordiality of
sociality or that social relationships constitute the grounds from which persons
emerge (e.g. Leenhardt 1979; Battaglia 1990; Strathern 1996). At times, however,
some of the current metaphysical or ontological projects can seem quite a blood-
less endeavour to reveal the metaphysical grounds of a social world or to reflect
on totalities such as ‘cosmology’ or universalistic or particularist ‘ontologies’ for
they respond to what questions: what is the constitution of the world/person/
object/matter? But in thinking of life we are moved to consider how questions:
how is a life lived? How does a life make its way in the world? Cavell (1976),
Das (2007), Heidegger (2001) Jackson (2009) and many others have made the
point that how questions are not merely empirical accounts of life but are onto-
logical in the sense that no what question precedes them – that is, there is no
logic of life that comes before its living. More important for the purpose of this
paper, the how question – how should I live my life? how are lives lived? –
seems to me eminently ethical (Laidlaw 2002: 316–7; Kleinman 2006).
In recent years, the turn towards ethics and morality within anthropology
has been explicit. For instance, in the works of Saba Mahmood (2005) and
Charles Hirschkind (2006), the important move was made to insist that
ethics is not some anonymous imposition of body techniques which blindly
form ethical beings in consonance with social norms of how one should
carry oneself, act and behave. Rather, ethical selves are actively made and culti-
vated by persons themselves; furthermore, a whole set of technologies, appara-
tuses and discourses is in play in this active formation of an ethical self. Pandian
(2010), in a recent article, follows such an interest in ethics and turns to
Deleuze’s metaphysics of ‘the fold’ in an attempt to think of ethical self-
awareness outside of the western liberal model of self-conscious subjectivity.
However, in an argument whose tone is closer to what I want to argue here,

Benson and O’Neill argue for a more originary ethics when they write that
‘ethics should be regarded as one of ethnography’s “first” moments just as
Levinas says that ethics is first philosophy. That is, we argue that ethics pre-
cedes knowledge and politics in the practice of ethnographic field research.
It is, phenomenologically speaking, more fundamental’ (2007:31).
In reaction, however, to a perceived uncritical use of categories such as
‘ethics’ and ‘morality’ without clear analytical distinction between the two,
Jarret Zigon proposes the ‘distinction between morality as the unreflective
mode of being-in-the-world and ethics as a tactic performed in the moment
of the breakdown of the ethical dilemma’ (2007:137). In another article, Zigon
talks of the ‘ethical moment’ in contradistinction to ‘morality’ which ‘is a
moment of conscious reflection and dialogue with one’s own moral disposi-
tions, as well as with the other two moralities, it is also a moment of

freedom, creativity, and emergence’ (2009:83). The equation here of ‘conscious
reflection’ with ‘freedom’ and the implication that ‘dispositions’ are constraining
or limiting is not particularly helpful and falls into an uncomfortable
metaphysical logic. We may well arrive at conceptual clarity with Zigon’s
distinction, but this clarity comes at the expense of understanding and
coming to grips with the heterogeneous phenomena of ethical life.
Unlike Zigon (2008:1), I am in agreement with David Parkin’s (1985:3 – 7)
claim that anthropologists have in a sense been studying morality all along
just not with any great conviction until recently. Now, however, that interest
in ethics and morality has become explicit, we need to start to catch-up to
the heterogeneity, and multiplicity of ethical experiences and forms, not limiting
the scope of concern and inquiry. One area which seems to have attracted
little interest from anthropologists researching ethics is how one can think of
an ethics of the relationship or the with. Currently, within anthropology, we
seem able only to engage with an ethics of self or the normative codes of a
social world. The etymology of ‘ethics’ is in sympathy with the focus on ‘self-
hood’ particularly if one turns to the Ancient Greek ethike which is based on
ethos, a person’s nature or disposition (OED). What is odd, however, is our
ability to commit to a notion of human-being as eccentric (i.e. outside itself),
or in the parlance of postmodernism, ‘de-centred’, spatially and temporally,
inter-involved and intersubjective, yet our notion of ethics tends invariably
towards and is centred on an ethics of the ‘self’.
I do not want to reject the analyses of ethical selves, my aim is to supplement
not negate the insights afforded by current research. Particularly, I see
developments in recent work on problems of “ontology” within anthropology

as having the potential to enlarge and complicate our understanding of ethics. I

do not see this as an easy merger neither do I see nor claim an obvious point of
intersection – in part this explains why I use ‘towards’ in the title of this piece.
Where there might be a point of crossover between ethics and ontology is in
thinking of the metaphysical claim of relationality and interdependence as
having import for ethical concerns. I employ the term ‘being-with’ because it
insists on the originality of the ‘with’ of being and takes anthropologists out of
the coupling of ethics/individual. What does this ‘with’ as an ethical category
look like, however? Let me return to Oum Hassan to give some shape to what
I am calling ‘ethical being-with’.
Modes of Ethical Being-with

Oum Hassan often says of her niece that she is hayati (my life). In ordinary
speech, there is nothing strange about this in Arabic and does not mark out a
particularly unique experience; indeed, many parents claim of their children
that he or she is hayati. There is of course a truth to this, one’s children are
part of and a crucial factor in a parent’s life as attested to by the sense of devas-
tation and loss that parents feel when they lose a child. For Oum Hassan, this
entwinement and enmeshment (Ingold 2007, 2008) of her life and her niece’s
life, the sense that we are not dealing with two lives but two different move-
ments directed towards the one life project, is much more pronounced.
‘I’ve given of my soul (indaad ib-ruhi) to her. I asked if she ever thought of
giving up her niece to a relative to look after. And what about me? Life only
has flavour (da’m) because of her. I have a reason to wake up in the morning,
to do what I am doing now. What I do . . . the pain I go through is unthinkable
. . . that I would put myself though this just . . . or even for my sister. Our life has
gone, we’re here for her. Never once have I thought of giving her up . . . how
can one give up their own life? That’s what she is . . . she is hayati’.
As anthropologists we rightly insist on social life as being fundamental to
human existence but once we move past this insight and begin to track what
implications and how such being-with manifests itself in our daily existence,
we can move from abstract ontological arguments to more concrete and, I
assert, ethical concerns. Oum Hassan’s life is not only imbricated in the lives
of her sister and niece, and all her inter-involvements with others – be it in
the market, work, etc. – having as their aim the care of her niece, the
concern for her being. Her life is ethical being-with in the sense that, and as
she stresses, her being is with and for her niece and ethical in the sense of her

daily activities have as their aim to care for her niece, which is in concern for
her being.
One day in February 2009, I saw Oum Hassan looking ill at ease with a
particularly worried look on her face. ‘What is it?’ I asked.
They won’t leave us alone. They are after us. Hayder. . . Who is after you? My family
. . . they want me to marry . . . they were running around last night. I could hear the
sounds of their movements between the shots being fired. They had robbed us of
what little we had months ago . . . we have been terrified everyday of our lives.
They killed our hearts. Now, at any moment they could break-in, take us . . . kill us
. . . In the middle of the night, no electricity, we could see nothing, they were
trying to get into the house . . . I don’t know but the gate was being hit and there
was whispering . . . I took my niece, we crouched in the bedroom, against the wall
. . . I wrapped my body around hers and covered the both of us with my ‘abaya.
One body enwrapped around another’s body. One being taking in another
not to appropriate its being but to take its suffering, its pain, its distress and
make it her own. ‘I didn’t want her to see or hear anything if something hap-
pened. . . I wanted to be dead before I saw anything happen to her’. Oum
Hassan quite literally takes her niece’s body into her own to shield her from
the world. Maybe the only thing the niece could hear was Oum Hassan’s
heart beating, beating for the both of them. In the Thompson thought
experiment, the relationship between persons is embodied in the line that
connects the two, in this case no gap separates one person from another.
This physical closeness, this ethical intercorporeality (Csordas 2008; Fischer
2008), embodies the existential entwinement of Oum Hassan’s life with her
niece’s – no gap separates the two; one life is for another.
Physical closeness, however, is not necessarily an index of existential inti-
macy. Another mode of ethical being-with is elucidated by Veena Das (2007)
who turns to the following account of pain in Wittgenstein’s The Blue and the
Brown Books: ‘Someone asks me to touch the painful spot with my right
hand. I do so and looking round perceive that I am touching my neighbour’s
hand’ (1969:49). ‘This would be pain felt in another’s body’ contends Das
(2007:40). Contrary to prominent accounts of pain such as Scarry’s (1985),
Das is arguing for pain as an ethical experience that opens worlds: ‘Pain in
this rendering is not that inexpressible something that destroys communication
or marks an exit from one’s existence in language. Instead, it makes a claim
on the other – asking for acknowledgment that may be given or denied’
(2007:40). My pain is somehow in the other’s hands even though it is my

own pain. This pain that I feel is not something I can fully appropriate, take
solely as mine, it requires an-other, but another intimate to me. Lacan’s
neologism ‘exitmacy’ (Lacan 1992 [1960]:129) – a contraction of ‘exterior’ and
‘intimacy’ – is a powerful dialectical distortion of the relation of inside and
outside; though another person may be ‘exterior’, a being outside me,
nonetheless – or maybe because of it – there is a more intimate relation by
being outside of me, other than me. Das in this case makes the point that
even in pain, the relationality of personhood is not jeopardized per se, but
recast; being does not necessarily close in upon its hermeneutic borders, it is
rather still open to the with of being-with-one-another and even reliant on it
in cases.
Oum Hassan and her niece stand not as witnesses to each other’s pain but as
conditions to get through and overcome the pain. The Judith Jarvis Thompson
thought experiment is a static affair; it works only by immobilizing the parts:
one person is in a comma, the other tied by a line. The only way out is by a
decision. However, Oum Hassan makes no grand decisions. She gets by, gets
through, makes do, only to do it all over again the next day. This only makes
sense and life only has flavour (da’m) because of another, her niece.
Concluding Remarks
One has to admit that the relationality of being is something that is posited
by the anthropologist with no direct empirical correlate. There are experiences
which suggest or point to a possible metaphysics, but these tend to be undercut
immediately by other experiences. Judith Butler suggests a possible point of
convergence between this metaphysical obscurity and ethics:
[The] postulation of a primary opacity to the self that follows from formative relations
has a specific implication for an ethical bearing toward the other. Indeed, if it is pre-
cisely by virtue of one’s relations to others that one is opaque to oneself, and if those
relations to others are the venue for one’s ethical responsibility, then it may well
follow that it is precisely by virtue of the subject’s opacity to itself that it incurs
and sustains some of its most important ethical bonds. (Butler 2005:20)
The limits of our knowledge of ourselves are epistemic limits but they can func-
tion as conditions in other domains such as the ethical sphere (Al-Mohammad
forthcoming).
I take Butler’s ‘opacity’ as having import for all anthropological research.
Wittgenstein writes that ‘The aspects of things that are most important for us

are hidden because of their simplicity and everydayness. (One is unable to

notice something – because it is always before one’s eyes)’ (2007[1953]:I129).
We have returned to the problem of intimacy, closeness and distance. What
is most intimate to us can be obtuse because it so close to us. I used the
‘towards’ in the title not only to indicate that the intentions of the paper are
unfulfilled, it is also in place to suggest that the project itself cannot be
completely fulfilled. In part, Butler’s ‘opacity’ and Wittgenstein’s ‘simplicity’
hint at why any investigation into ethical life will always contain important
and fundamental lacunae, though Butler asserts that such limits have a
determining role in life – ethical life – as such.
Oum Hassan’s attention, however, is directed to more proximal matters. Her
hopes and dreams lie in her niece and what she will become. This is a burden on
the young girl, no doubt, but her life has not come easy, either to her or her aunt.
The tremendous struggles that Oum Hassan and many men and women have
gone through in Iraq to maintain their existence and the lives dependent on
their existence show the courage, relentless battling and ‘talent for life’
(Scheper-Hughes 2008) it has taken to survive and exist in post-invasion Iraq.
As I have maintained in this paper, our understanding of ethics and ethical
life must be complicated by taking into much greater consideration the
relationality, interdependency and intercorporeality of human existence. This
metaphysical insight into human existence insisted on by anthropologists
from Maurice Leenhardt to contemporary figures such as Marilyn Strathern
in the Melanesian case is an ethical insight which insists that the care and
formation of the self is but one form, one mode of ethical being. Our ethical
lives are entangled and enmeshed into the lives of others, and this enmeshment
indicates not only that our existential coordinates are eccentric but so too are
our ethical coordinates and responsibilities.
In getting through a day’s work, Oum Hassan would repeatedly say: ‘it’s all
for her’. This is not merely an aspect of her life, the whole project of her life con-
tained her niece as part of that project, the reason for it. Life is not a singular but
always takes another in the form of the with. By attending to how lives are lived,
not what is life, and attending to the overlappings of lives, intentionalities and
bodies, life and anthropological research itself can be shown as inherently
ethical.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the editors of Ethnos and the anonymous reviewers for their
comments. The research used here was made possible by E.S.R.C. funding.

Notes
1. Exemplified within moral and political philosophy no better than John Rawls’
(1971) ‘reflective equilibrium’ – a process of deliberative mutual adjustment
among general principles and particular judgements to attain ‘equilibrium’ and
consistency.
2. I have chosen to talk of ‘world’ and not ‘worlds’ though, following Nelson
Goodman, I do not believe that this needs close off discussion with the pluralist:
the issue between monism and pluralism tends to evaporate under analysis. If
there is but one world, it embraces a multiplicity of contrasting aspects; if
there are many worlds, the collection of them all is one. The one world may
be taken as many, or the many worlds taken as one; whether one or many
depends on the way of taking. (1978:2).
3. Since my initial visit to Basra in the summer of 2005, I have spent more than 20
months in the city. My last period of fieldwork in the city was conducted from
January 2009 till September of the same year with only one return visit to the
UK of less than 1 month. I have not changed ‘Oum Hassan’s’ name.
4. The use of life histories has been re-emerging within anthropology as a powerful
tool to capture the intricacies of power relations, violence, suffering, pain, human
endeavour and as a means of ambiguating macro-narratives such as medical tech-
nology and the state (Rubenstein 2002; Desjarlais 2003; Biehl 2005; Rapport 2009;
Pandian 2010).
5. I have borrowed the term ‘being-with’ from the Heideggerian lexicon (Heidegger
1967 [1927]) without making reference to any of the metaphysical claims.
6. I have not changed the number of my room in order to protect its identity; it is just
by sheer chance that of the cheapest rooms in the hotel, room 101 was the one in
least disrepute.
7. The situation has improved dramatically in Basra since March 2008 when the Iraqi
Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, launched an attack on the militias which was code-
named Saulat al-Fursan, meaning ‘Operation Charge of the Knights’ (Cordesman &
Mausner 2009:63; Ehrenberg 2010:246). This has weakened quite severely the
strength of the militias and gangs in Basra, and trade has increased in the city bring-
ing greater movement of persons nationally and internationally due to the increase
in security.
8. If Oum Hassan was a younger woman, it would have been improprietous for her to
be in my room unaccompanied. However, as she is considered an elderly woman in
Iraq because of her physical disabilities and referred to me as ‘ibni’ (‘my son’) as a
mark of affection for me, there was never an issue other than ribald comments
made by the hotel staff.
9. Electricity in Basra rarely exceeds 12 h delivery in a day which is split into six
windows of 2 h. However, the 2 h of electricity is very unstable; hence, one is
lucky to enjoy more than an hour and a half at most. In summer, when many are
running their power-consuming air-conditioning units the hours delivered in a
day plummet.
10. I only began to take notes of our conversations from January 2009, however.

11. I assume that the name ‘Oum Hassan’ comes from the fact that her first name is
‘Fatima’ who was the daughter of the Prophet Mohammad, whose eldest son was
‘Hassan’, hence ‘Oum Hassan’. For example, if a man’s name is ‘Ali’ in Iraq,
many would refer to him as ‘Abu Hussein’ even if he has no children. This is just
a convention.
12. As of August 2009, work began to refurbish the Sheraton Hotel with the aim of
re-opening it sometime in 2011.
13. For clarification, Iraq has the highest number of members per household, averaging
almost 7.5 people per house, the highest rate in the world as of 2008 (IFHSSG 2008).
The dearth of housing coupled with the fact that the Basra Governorate has limited
the building of houses because exploration for oil is being conducted in much of the
province has meant that houses, or more importantly, the land houses are built on,
are extremely expensive in Basra. Friends and acquaintances of mine who have sold
their houses have tended to wait less than a week or two before full payment is
received. Oum Hassan, however, does not sell because she refuses to put her
money into a bank and would end up having a hundred thousand dollars or so
lying around a house which would be even more likely to be robbed. Furthermore,
Oum Hassan, like most Iraqi parents, feels it is crucial that a house is left for her child
after she passes away.
14. Iraqis were receiving many copies of original items such as clothing and machinery
from Taiwan; hence, the suggestion is that these chiefs themselves are ‘fakes’.
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Towards an Ethics of Being-With:

Intertwinements of Life in Post-Invasion Basra

keywords Iraq, Basra, being-with, ethics, life

he smallest number, in the strict sense, is two’. (Aristotle 1983, Physics:

Judith Jarvis Thomson’s famous thought experiment is posed in the follow-

ethnos, vol. 75:4, december 2010 (pp. 425 –446)

Kafkan similarities to one side, the thought experiment is an attempt by

ethnos, vol. 75:4, december 2010 (pp. 425 –446)

ethnos, vol. 75:4, december 2010 (pp. 425 –446)

ethnos, vol. 75:4, december 2010 (pp. 425 –446)

Basra and the 2003 Invasion

ethnos, vol. 75:4, december 2010 (pp. 425 –446)

ethnos, vol. 75:4, december 2010 (pp. 425 –446)

ethnos, vol. 75:4, december 2010 (pp. 425 –446)

A Struggling Oum Hassan

ethnos, vol. 75:4, december 2010 (pp. 425 –446)

ethnos, vol. 75:4, december 2010 (pp. 425 –446)

similar to what I am trying to capture. In his own words:

Though human existence is relational – a mode of being-in-the-world – it is conti-

Being-with and Ethics

ethnos, vol. 75:4, december 2010 (pp. 425 –446)

ethnos, vol. 75:4, december 2010 (pp. 425 –446)

ethnos, vol. 75:4, december 2010 (pp. 425 –446)

tions, as well as with the other two moralities, it is also a moment of

ethnos, vol. 75:4, december 2010 (pp. 425 –446)

as having the potential to enlarge and complicate our understanding of ethics. I

Modes of Ethical Being-with

ethnos, vol. 75:4, december 2010 (pp. 425 –446)

ethnos, vol. 75:4, december 2010 (pp. 425 –446)

ethnos, vol. 75:4, december 2010 (pp. 425 –446)

are hidden because of their simplicity and everydayness. (One is unable to

ethnos, vol. 75:4, december 2010 (pp. 425 –446)

ethnos, vol. 75:4, december 2010 (pp. 425 –446)

ethnos, vol. 75:4, december 2010 (pp. 425 –446)

Csordas, T.J. 2008. Intersubjectivity and Intercorporeality. Subjectivity, 22(1):110–21.

ethnos, vol. 75:4, december 2010 (pp. 425 –446)

ethnos, vol. 75:4, december 2010 (pp. 425 –446)

Oxford University Press.

ethnos, vol. 75:4, december 2010 (pp. 425 –446)

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