Negotiating the moral community : Moral intimacy in the shadow of Colombia's rebel rule

Sammanfattning: While cultural anthropology has a well-established tradition of studying armed conflict and postconflict societies, its consideration of morality in this context has hitherto been granted a tangential, rather than central role. Addressing this gap, the present thesis draws on qualitative data collected during four weeks of fieldwork carried out in the rural inland of Colombia’s Urabá region between June and July of 2018 to explore the ways in which morality is locally constructed in communities afflicted by a history of armed violence and rebel governance. Relying on the informal nature of networks and social relations identified by extant anthropological research, it develops an inductive analytical framework intended to examine the moral dimension of life in conflict-affected communities. More specifically, it explores how communities come to construct and share a moral framework passible of sustaining cooperative and interdependent relationships in light of the strain that protracted armed violence exertson social relationships and institutions. The obtained results highlight the existence of a binding sense of ‘moral intimacy’, which stems from the collective awareness of the contextual pressures that shape people’s moral judgments and often narrow the scope of personal agency. Individual morality and the constant challenges posed to it by life in conflict-afflicted areas are found to converge into a particularly adapted ‘extra-ordinary situational ethics of conflict’, characterized by ambiguity and mistrust, but also by tolerance and understanding for other people’s—and one’s own—moral shortcomings. Finally, the role of moral leaders is explored and differentiated with respect to its relation to the above-mentioned extra-ordinary situational ethics of conflict. The figure of ‘moral moderator’ is proposed in order to describe the articulating role of central figures that serve as reference points for the informal ethics that arise in surroundings characterized by pervasive and protracted violence. Overall, this thesis sheds light on the peculiar nature of morality in conflict-afflicted societies, and provides an empirical and theoretical contribution to its future systematic study.