Selfishness and Selflessness

New Approaches to Understanding Morality

Buch | Softcover

244 Seiten

2024
Berghahn Books (Verlag)
978-1-80539-722-9 (ISBN)

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We are said to be suffering a narcissism epidemic when the need for collective action seems more pressing than ever. The traits of Selfishness and selflessness address the ‘proper’ and ‘improper’ relationship between one’s self and others. The work they do during periods of social instability and cultural change is probed in this original, interdisciplinary collection. Contributions range from an examination of how these concepts animated the eighteenth-century anti-slavery campaigners to a dissection of the way middle-class mothers’ experiences illustrate gendered struggles over how much and to whom one is morally obliged to give.

Linda L. Layne is the author of Home and Homeland: The Dialogics of Tribal and National Identities in Jordan (1994, Princeton University Press) and Motherhood Lost: A Feminist Account of Pregnancy Loss in America (2003, Routledge) and co-producer of a television series on pregnancy loss. She has edited or co-edited numerous volumes on motherhood, parenting and consumer culture. She now studies heterosexual single mothers by choice, lesbian moms and gay dads.

List of Illustrations, Figures and Tables

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Self, Selfish, Selfless

Linda L. Layne

Chapter 1. Taking the Measure of ‘Selfishness’ and ‘Selflessness’ in the Early Twenty-First-Century US and UK

Linda L. Layne

Chapter 2. ‘Sentiment Has Struggled with Selfishness’: Selfishness, Sensibility and Gender in the Late Eighteenth-Century British Antislavery Campaign

G.J. Barker-Benfield

Chapter 3. Selfless Advocacy? Profeminist Men’s Movements in Late Twentieth-Century Britain

Lucy Delap

Chapter 4. ‘Doing the Right Thing for My Child’: Self Work and Selflessness in Accounts of British ‘Full-Term’ Breastfeeding Mothers

Charlotte Faircloth

Chapter 5. Sexism, Separatism and the Rhetoric of Selfishness: Single Mothers by Choice in the US and UK

Susanna Graham and Linda L. Layne

Chapter 6. Selfish Masturbators? The Experience of Danish Sperm Donors and Alternatives to the Selfish/Selfless Divide

Sebastian Mohr

Chapter 7. Inroads into Altruism

Marilyn Strathern

Chapter 8. On Being Selfish – Or Not: Explorations of an Idea from the Mountains of Oaxaca and the Alaskan Tundra

Barbara Bodenhorn

Conclusion: Starting Points: Modest Contributions to the History and Anthropology of Moralities and Ethics

Linda L. Layne

Index

Erscheinungsdatum	10.09.2024
Reihe/Serie	WYSE Series in Social Anthropology
Verlagsort	Oxford
Sprache	englisch
Themenwelt	Sozialwissenschaften ► Ethnologie
Themenwelt	Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie
ISBN-10	1-80539-722-2 / 1805397222
ISBN-13	978-1-80539-722-9 / 9781805397229
Zustand	Neuware