Module  'Responsibility’ in Bern, organised by Prof. Julia Eckert, Universität Bern with Nandini Sundar and John Comaroff.

Date: June 8./9. 2010

The attribution of responsibility is a key operation in any social organisation. Conceptualisations of responsibility tell us about specific distinctions between duty, guilt, fate or chance. They relate to knowledge systems of causality and culpability, and inform notions of justice and injustice.
Responsibility and liability are central to any concept of law, and we find particular and widely varying notions of responsibility and liability in all legal orders. They differ in their theories of causality, their norms of obligation and their ideas of morality, and they differ in how they relate causal responsibility, responsibility in terms of duties and obligations and moral responsibility to each other. They differ in their attribution of strict liability and the factors which are taken into account as extenuating circumstances. They are particular as to the rules by which individuals or collectives are attributed responsibility, and the ways in which individual and corporate responsibility relate to each other.
In a more general anthropological sense, differing notions of liability express different forms of social organisation. Conceptualisations of responsibility thus exemplify the relation of social organisation and law. They touch on the issues of the place of the individual within secondary groups and within society; on understandings of the world and oneself within it; of the different boundaries drawn between social groups pertaining to different issues. Responsibility has a temporal dimension, expressing notions of how generations are connected; of when time lapses; and under which conditions of exception rules of liability do not apply. Responsibility delineates the world in how far it incorporates nature into its scope. Thus, explorations of responsibility tell us about the construction of specific social relations and their relation to the social and cosmological order.

We can currently observe fundamental changes in constructions of liability. Particularly, current processes of the transnationalisation of legal concepts, of religious norms of responsibility, of scientific understanding of the biological basis of human behaviour, and changes in the organisation of governance are of interest in this regard. We witness changing notions of the person, of communities and relations of obligation, of temporal connectedness. We observe plural religiously founded notions of liability and ideals of responsibility and the ways such religious notions of liability and responsibility are transformed in their interaction with other notions of responsibility. We are dealing with the reorganisation of governance both in terms of the new delineation of tasks and novel constellation of actors, and the fragmentation of responsibility and liability that may ensue. In question is thus the global political economy of narratives of causality, of culpability, of risk, fate, karma, justice and injustice.