Telic Attunements: Moods and Ultimate Values (Among Meditation Practitioners in the United States)

Moral anthropology has recently highlighted a variety of sine quibus non (virtue, freedom, evil, and so on) that are conceptually needed if anthropologists are to better understand morality. I add to this list the concept of “telos” and offer an account for how it features in the emotional lives of...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Ethos (Berkeley, Calif.) Calif.), 2018-12, Vol.46 (4), p.498-518
Main Author: Mckay, Francis
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Anthropologists
Anthropology
Buddhism
Emotions
Ethics
Ethnographic research
Freedoms
Meditation
moods
Morality
Proximity
teleology
Values
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Summary:Moral anthropology has recently highlighted a variety of sine quibus non (virtue, freedom, evil, and so on) that are conceptually needed if anthropologists are to better understand morality. I add to this list the concept of “telos” and offer an account for how it features in the emotional lives of ethical subjects. Applying recent work in moral anthropology on ultimate values to a discussion of moods, I argue that moods disclose attunements to telic values, and do so in three key ways, namely, as attunements of absence, proximity, and fulfillment, what collectively I call “telic attunements.” I illustrate this through my own ethnographic research on the kinds of moods that turned up for a community of Shambhala Buddhist meditators, showing how meditation was used to move away from absence and toward fulfillment.
ISSN:0091-2131
1548-1352
DOI:10.1111/etho.12217