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Jarrett Zigon is a social theorist, philosopher and anthropologist at the University of Virginia, where he is the William & Linda Porterfield Chair in Bioethics and Professor of Anthropology. From 2018 to 2020, he was the founding director of the Center for Data Ethics and Justice at the University of Virginia. Previously, he had been at the University of Amsterdam and the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology.

Zigon is best known for his writing on ethics and political theory – most particularly for his conceptions of moral breakdown, moral assemblages, attunement, dwelling, and relational ethics. This work has had a major influence on the anthropology of ethics, and critical phenomenological approaches to ethics and politics. He has developed these concepts while writing about the war on drugs and addiction, as well as data science and artificial intelligence.

Zigon is committed to an ongoing conversation between anthropology and philosophy. He is particularly recognized for articulating an anthropology strongly influenced by post-Heideggerian continental philosophy and critical theory, the theoretical articulation of which he describes as critical hermeneutics.

He has contributed several articles to openDemocracy on addiction, the war on drugs, and political activism.

A War on People: The Drug War and the Hermeneutic Politics of Those who Resist it
If we see that our contemporary condition is one of war and widely diffused complexity, how do we understand our most basic ethical motivations? What might be the aims of our political activity? A War on People takes up these questions and offers a glimpse of a possible alternative future in this ethnographically and theoretically rich examination of the activity of some unlikely political actors: users of heroin and crack cocaine, both active and former. The result is a groundbreaking book on how anti–drug war political activity offers transformative processes that are termed worldbuilding and enacts nonnormative, open, and relationally inclusive alternatives to such key concepts as community, freedom, and care.

Disappointment: Toward a Critical Hermeneutics of Worldbuilding
Increasingly, anthropologists, political theorists and philosophers are calling for imaginative and creative analyses and theories that might help us think and bring about an otherwise. Disappointment responds to this call by showing how collaboration between an anthropologist and a political movement of marginalized peoples can disclose new possibilities for being and acting politically. Drawing from nearly a decade of research with the global anti-drug war movement, Jarrett Zigon puts ethnography in dialogue with both political theory and continental philosophy to rethink some of the most fundamental ontological, political and ethical concepts. The result is to show that ontological starting points have real political implications, and thus, how an alternative ontological starting point can lead to new possibilities for building worlds more ethically attuned to their inhabitants.

HIV is God's Blessing: Rehabilitating Morality in Neoliberal Russia
This provocative study examines the role of today’s Russian Orthodox Church in the treatment of HIV/AIDS. Russia has one of the fastest-growing rates of HIV infection in the world—80 percent from intravenous drug use—and the Church remains its only resource for fighting these diseases. Jarrett Zigon takes the reader into a Church-run treatment center where, along with self-transformational and religious approaches, he explores broader anthropological questions—of morality, ethics, what constitutes a “normal” life, and who defines it as such. Zigon argues that this rare Russian partnership between sacred and political power carries unintended consequences: even as the Church condemns the influence of globalization as the root of the problem it seeks to combat, its programs are cultivating citizen-subjects ready for self-governance and responsibility, and better attuned to the neoliberal world the Church ultimately opposes.

Making the New Post-Soviet Person: Moral Experience in Contemporary Moscow
The post-Soviet years have widely been interpreted as a period of intense moral questioning, debate, and struggle. Despite this claim few studies have revealed how this moral experience has been lived and articulated by Russians themselves. This book provides an intimate portrait of how five Muscovites have experienced the post-Soviet years as a period of intense refashioning of their moral personhood, and how this process can only be understood at the intersection of their unique personal experiences, a shared Russian/Soviet history, and increasingly influential global discourses and practices. The result is a new approach to understanding everyday moral experience and the processes by which new moral persons are cultivated.

Morality: An Anthropological Perspective
Morality: An Anthropological Perspective provides the first account of anthropological approaches to the question of morality. By considering how morality is viewed and enacted in different cultures, and how it is related to key social institutions such as religion, law, gender, sexuality and medical practice, Morality takes a closer look at some of the most central questions of the morality debates of our time.

Books

 * A War on People: Drug User Politics and a New Ethics of Community. Oakland: University of California Press. 2019.
 * Disappointment: Toward a Critical Hermeneutics of Worldbuilding. New York: Fordham University Press. 2018.
 * HIV is God's Blessing Rehabilitating Morality in Neoliberal Russia. Berkeley: University of California Press. 2011.
 * Making the New Post-Soviet Person: Moral Experience in Contemporary Moscow. Leiden: Brill. 2010.
 * Morality: An Anthropological Perspective. Oxford: Berg Publishers. 2008.

Articles

 * “Can Machines Be Ethical?: On the Necessity of Relational Ethics and Empathic Attunement for Data-Centric Technologies,” in Social Research: An International Quarterly, vol 86, no. 4. 2019.
 * “What is a situation?: an assemblic ethnography of the drug war,” in Cultural Anthropology, vol. 30, no. 3. 2015.
 * “An Ethics of Dwelling and a Politics of World-Building: A Critical Response to Ordinary Ethics,” in Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 20, 746-64. 2014.
 * “Maintaining the ‘Truth:’ performativity, human rights, and the limitations on politics,” in Theory and Event, vol. 17, no. 3. 2014.
 * “Temporalization and Ethical Action,” in Journal of Religious Ethics, vol. 42, no. 3. 2014.
 * “Attunement and Fidelity: Two Ontological Conditions for Morally Being-in-the-World,” in Ethos, vol. 42, no.1. 2014.
 * “Moral breakdown and the ethical demand: A theoretical framework for an anthropology of moralities,” in Anthropological Theory, vol. 7, no. 2. 2007