Week 1: What would a new anthropology look like?

Week 1: What would a new anthropology look like?

ANTH 3623: Reconciling justice with anthropology (Semester 1, 2026)
February 23, 2026

Main reading: Antrosio (2013); Wheeler (2017)

Slides available at https://anthrograph.rschram.org/3623/2026/01

Notes

Why are we here? We are students, we’re students of anthropology, and we are people living on Earth in 2026. What should we be doing? And, specifically, what important things does anthropology help us to do? What’s the purpose of anthropology?

Anthropology has always been many things to many people. It has changed a lot over its history, and one of the more important changes was to fully professionalize itself and to create a stable niche within systems of higher education and research. Anthropology is one of the things you can study at university. That’s a purpose. Is that enough?

Many anthropologists claim that anthropology’s purpose is to challenge theories and ideologies that claim to be universal, particularly ones that posit a universal human essence. Universalism is ethnocentrism in disguise, and treats every instance of human difference as a lack. Anthropology rejects this thinking. Universalism is easy to disprove, because the ways of being human are obviously many. Anthropology teaches us to approach difference in a frame of relativism.

Yet relativism can be difficult. It is a double paradox. Firstly, the basis for anthropological relativism is the assumption of a universal capacity for humans to acquire a culture and the universal need for people to be members of a larger community. Secondly, the ethical stance of tolerance that derives from a relativist perspective on cultural difference is also a universal stance: Everyone should be a relativist and learn to accept both their own dependence on culture and other people’s different yet equally coherent worldviews, norms, and social systems. Anthropology’s relativism is in that sense a bit like secularism: to each their own culture. True relativism would go farther and deny any possible basis for judging right and wrong for anyone other than oneself. It is thus a poor basis for what we call social justice, or any effort to formulate a praxis for social change. To speak of justice at all is to make universal claims. Can anthropology offer anything to a theory of justice?

What kinds of universals would we as a class accept and do we hold for ourselves? Particularly for today’s many crises—inequality, climate change, war, oppression—what is the purpose anthropology can and should have, and what is the role for relativist and universalist approaches.

There’s theory and there’s praxis

For Aristotle, one can engage in theoria (contemplation) or in praxis (action). (Nicomachean Ethics, book IV, 1–8 [1138b–1141b])¹

• Contemplation involves rational thinking and leads to absolute, necessary truth.
• Action is guided by practical wisdom (phronesis), which informs the choice of good actions.

Social science is a contradiction in terms, and a dilemma for social scientists

There is a drive for truth about societies, which is to say about ourselves. It’s always going to cross into phronesis.

Many adopt Marx’s 11th thesis on Feuerbach (i.e. his 11th statement of why Feuerbach is too invested in theoria over praxis):

“XI. The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.” (Marx [1845] 1978, 145)

The point of philosophy, especially ethical and political philosophy, is to derive phronesis that informs praxis.

What is anthropology good for?

In small groups, come up with your slogan for anthropology. Imagine you have to explain the value of anthropology to people in:

• Economics
• Evolutionary biology
• Sociology
• Literature, humanities
• History

How would you explain anthropology, and specifically the benefit or the value of anthropology as a basis for praxis, to students or scholars in these other fields?

This class is about justice

As John Rawls writes,

Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought. A theory however elegant and economical must be rejected or revised if it is untrue; likewise laws and institutions no matter how efficient and well-arranged must be reformed or abolished if they are unjust. (Rawls 1971, 3)

Any theory of justice will justify itself by appealing to a specific idea of what makes humans human, an anthropology (although not our anthropology). Theories of justice are universal theories, and rest on an a universal assumption about the human essence. The question is what it contains and how deep it goes.

This class is also about what we call “social justice”

When did you first learn this phrase, “social justice”? What does it mean? Where do you hear it?

Take out a piece of paper and reflect on “social justice” and how you define it.

Anthropology sits on a spectrum

Answering questions of justice involves making universal claims, although different people make different ones. Anthropology doesn’t know how to feel about any of them.

As mentioned, theories of justice involve an anthropology. Where does sociocultural anthropology (the one with fieldwork and ethnography) sit relative to the philosophical anthropologies of influential conceptions of justice?

The topics in this class

This class is a series of examples of ideas from anthropology that are relevant to anthropology as a praxis, and other examples of people engaged with topics and ideas anthropologists care about, but in the normative frame one uses for questions of justice.

• It’s not a class on “theories of justice”
• Nor is it a class on anthropology of law or the cross-cultural comparison of systems of justice
• Nor is it a series of ethnographic examples of situations of injustice
• Nor is it a series of ethnographic cases of new, contemporary movements for social justice

It’s all of the above—with empirical case studies, polemics, and conceptual arguments, all meant as resources for us to draw our own conclusions about what to do with anthropology now, in the 21st century.

The main idea is that anthropology offers phronesis now, for today’s world, because anthropology expands people’s imagination of what is possible.

Some key themes from the class topics

• Relationships have “rights” (Relationships, not individuals, are the real subject of justice)
• Egalitarian societies are possible
• Social change comes from abolition of the existing order, not reform
• Inegalitarian relationships and structures are not inherently unjust, and certain kinds of equality deny certain possible alternatives
• People’s interdependence matters more than their identity or individuality
• People can prefigure the conditions they desire
• Change happens in in-between spaces and cracks in what appears to be solid
• Repair is possible

This list is open to expansion. These are just some examples of the phronesis I find in anthropology.

Anthropology is suited to living in abnormal times

Abnormal times call for “abnormal justice” (Fraser 2008).