This chapter contends that anthropology needs a fresh, more sophisticated approach to rules as a complement to what has become a thriving ‘anthropology of ethics’. That literature seeks to move beyond notions of ethics and morality as ‘codes of conduct’ and explore instead what Foucault calls ‘the care of the self’, that is, projects of virtuous self-fashioning. The neglect, even dismissal, of rules in these discussions comes despite the obvious ubiquity and importance of the use of rules as technologies of the self, as in dietary regimes. The chapter explores the use of rules in one ethical tradition, the Islamic sharīʿah, through ethnography from Lebanon. Thinking more carefully about the nature of rules—their ‘necessary suboptimality’ for instance—opens up promising avenues of ethnographic inquiry rather than the theoretical dead-end that recent anthropology has assumed.
