Anthropology is the study of humanity. That’s the anthropos in anthropology. And yet anthropology and anthropologists are hard to pin down on what defines the human. For the most part, they avoid the position that there is a universal human which can be applied to anyone anywhere. Yet anthropologists have made strong claims about people in general, even if they avoid any substantive sense of human nature. And anthropologists rely upon a tacit understanding of the human even when they criticize other reductionist explanations of human behavior, for instance those based on evolution (or some simplified, speculative theory of human evolution). To claim that humans and human communities make themselves relies on the idea that all people have an innate capacity to acquire culture. This thin universalism has been an important strain in cultural anthropology.
The idea of humanity itself is both more questioned now than ever. Thanks in part to anthropology, people are more aware that any definition of the human in abstract is not really neutral. It comes from a particular place and time, and thus is usually smuggling in ethnocentric biases. Yet at the same time, I think people are more interested in humanity, not as an essence to be grasped in the abstract but in the sense of a shared existence now. Climate change threatens human existence and so invites a planetary frame of reference, which is almost a universal one. Artificial intelligence is defined by its difference from and mimicry of human intelligence, and thus prompts the question of what, if anything, defines people’s intelligence, consciousness, and cognition. Should we swing back from doubting humanity to again asking questions of human nature? Probably not, but we might do better by giving up on nature and instead see the human as an open-ended process and project.