Dr. Carlos Londoño

Carlos received his undergraduate degree in anthropology from the Universidad de Antioquia, in his hometown of Medellín, Colombia, in 1995, and his PhD from the University of St. Andrews, in Scotland, in 2001. He was the recipient of a SSHRC Standard Research Grant (2005-2009), and of a prestigious Richard Carley Hunt Fellowship from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research (2005-2006). He is the author of two books: Muinane: un proyecto moral a perpetuidad (Universidad de Antioquia, 2004) and People of Substance: An Ethnography of Morality in the Colombian Amazon (University of Toronto Press 2012).

Project: “Antonio – a case study for a program for an anthropology of morality”

This is one of three case studies that will make part of a programmatic monograph intended to put forward a detailed theoretical and methodological scaffolding for interpretive anthropological studies of morality. This case study will  provide a rich interpretation of a common modern Western picture of the admirable, autonomous moral agent that seems to underlie claims concerning the purportedly morally neutral superiority of scientific over other worldviews.

Conversation

HRI
What motivated or sparked you to become a humanities researcher/scholar?

CL
This question tempts me to go historical and psychoanalytical. If I’d been asked this question a few years ago, and if you’d allowed me to pursue my fancy, I’d have said that it all had a lot to do with my mom, an East coast Jew from the US living in diaspora in Colombia. To me, born and raised in Colombia, she often sounded very idiosyncratically obsessed with the history of family relations and of her own and every other family member’s thought processes and emotions. One day I heard her conversing with an American cousin, and realized that her thing was actually shared with others on her side of the family. They sounded wonderfully like a scene from a Woody Allen movie, with lots of Freudian references. I also recognized in myself a similar interest in trying to understand why people think and behave as they do. Especially me. So I’d have oversimplified and stereotypified egregiously, and said it was a Jewish thing. But more recently I read Charles Taylor’s account of the history of Western understandings of personhood and sociality, and discovered that my interests and motivations resonate rather closely with Calvinists. (Don’t ask me why. I was raised in Colombia, in the midst of a mainly Catholic family. And I love to offend my friends by telling them I’m the only real atheist I know.) So if you ask me the question now, I’ll bracket all that and say the humanities-type and social scientific interpretive questions I’m asking came from the influence of my wonderful PhD supervisor, Joanna Overing. Let me address this further in the next question.

HRI
How did you come to your research focus/disciplinary specialization?

CL
When I first arrived at the University of St. Andrews to embark on my PhD program, my intention was to produce anthropological research that modeled itself on research in the natural sciences. (I liked something called ‘evolutionary epistemology’, as developed by psychologist Donald C. Campbell and philosopher Karl Popper.) I wanted to say stuff about human life that would have comparable status to the claims made by the ‘hard-headed’ sciences. Joanna Overing heard my spiel on this, and promptly sent me off to read philosophers Charles Taylor, Nelson Goodman, and Richard Rorty, linguist V. Voloshinov, and a bunch of good ethnographies, and suddenly I no longer found it possible or desirable to model my own research on that of natural scientists (though I still loved the latters’ work.) Instead, I found it necessary to think interpretively, and to recognize that to understand thinking, feeling, interacting human beings, one needs, inescapably, to understand their interpretations, which very much shape them and their interactions. This emphasis on interpretations and on the fact that they shape what they’re about will necessarily inject some circularity and intrinsic contestability into what we humanities-types have got to say. I had to learn to be fine with that, because that is where rigor lies, when studying people ethnographically. I’d still stick to the claim that we’re rigorous and self-critical. We are also lucky to be working on such fascinating, challenging topics.

HRI
Which humanities scholar or creative practitioner inspires you and why?

CL
I like Charles Taylor. I find his take on language in relation to personhood very sophisticated and persuasive, and readily applicable to anthropological research. I also deeply appreciate his emphasis on the fact that moral evaluations (which come in many forms) are central to the kinds of beings persons are and can be. Again, this is something that can be brought readily and edifyingly into discussions in my own discipline. I find it key, however, to engage with his accounts with tools acquired through radically empirical ethnographic research.

HRI
What are two things about your humanities research that make them relevant to other researchers, scholars or students? To the broader public?

CL
Let me get away with only one thing, but it’s a big one. I’d say that interpretive research like mine is necessary if one wants to understand morality. I define the latter as people’s practices, understandings, and sensibilities that involve their making strong qualitative distinctions of worth concerning actions, thoughts, emotions, relationships, ways of life, embodiments, persons, human groupings, and sundry other aspects of personhood and sociality. It involves people finding these admirable or despicable, cowardly or honorable, observant or lax, and tacky or classy, to mention but a few of the great many qualitative distinctions available to English speakers. There are many other qualitative distinctions of worth, and they differ between and within social groups across space an2d time. Morality also involves people being motivated by these and similar evaluations—in a word, by a complex picture of the moral agent in a certain kind of social cosmos—and acting in ways that in time shape both people themselves and their social milieus. Again, the claim is a big one: since understanding morality is absolutely essential to understanding both individual persons and the groups they constitute, and since morality must be studied interpretively, rigorous interpretive research like mine is irreplaceable (not to mention, rich, exciting, and pertinent).

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Update January 2016:

My HRI fellowship allowed me to travel to Colombia to interview renowned Colombian science writer (and my father-in-law) Antonio Vélez; I gave an HRI presentation on this research. Recently, the essay I wrote was published. (2015. Antonio Vélez: A Champion of Big History. In From Big Bang to Galactic Civilizations: A Big History Anthology, Vol. 1. Eds. Barry Rodrigue, Leonid Grinin and Andrey Korotayev. Delhi: Primus Books. Pp. 163-182.)

My research with Antonio was one of three case studies that are part of my overarching project, which is to produce a theoretical and methodological program for the study of morality in anthropology (and more widely, in the social sciences and humanities). Funding for the other two case studies came from the Faculty of Arts’ Dean’s Award and from the President’s Fund.

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