Week 7: The opposite of rights

ANTH 3623: Reconciling justice with anthropology (Semester 1, 2026)
April 13, 2026

Main reading: Lino e Silva (2025)

Notes

This week’s topic picks up on a dual theme of the class: (1) Alternative conceptions of justice are formulated as part of and beginning with a critique of the limits of liberalism; (2) Ethnographic accounts, which are necessarily grounded in other people’s subjective experiences, open the conceptual space necessary to critique liberalism. Lino e Silva is on the one hand building on an longstanding interest in anthropology in the critique of liberalism as a symptom of bourgeois culture. He is also interested in the idea that ethnography itself, rather than what an author of an ethnography says, participates in that opening.

As we move into the second half of the semester, we will also be working toward a goal, which is for each student to make a claim about how they enter the fraught space of normative and descriptive accounts of human experiences. This begins with thinking of different topics you can study on your own. We will discuss what counts as a topic in class this week. To prepare, consider the topics we have already encountered. For this and for the other empirical studies we have read, ask yourself what is the authors who, what, where, and when.

Identifying topics

  1. The Iceberg: What’s really happening below the surface is very different from what’s visible above the surface
  2. Take a note card.
  3. Write what you know about the most shocking thing you learned in your study of anthropology.
  4. Pass your note card to the front.

Citizenship in retrospect: What if Ruth Bader Ginsburg is wrong?

[T]he framers [of the US constitution] had a distinctly limited vision of those who counted among “We the People.” Qualified voters when the nation was new bore more than a passing resemblance to the framers: the franchise was confined to property-owning adult white males, people free from dependence on others, and therefore considered trustworthy citizens, not susceptible to influence or control by masters, overlords, or supervisors. (Ginsburg 1992, 1187)

But the founders stated a commitment in the Declaration of Independence to equality and in the Declaration and the Bill of Rights to individual liberty. Those commitments had growth potential. As historian Richard Morris has written, a prime portion of the history of the U.S. Constitution is the story of the extension (through amendment, judicial interpretation, and practice) of constitutional rights and protections to once-excluded groups: to people who were once held in bondage, to men without property, to Native Americans, and to women. (Ginsburg 1992, 1188)

Is this a persuasive account of citizenship in (1) the US; (2) a society that you know well; (3) Australia? What does it get right and what does it get wrong?

Key concepts

Exploring a topic in small groups

  1. Appoint a note-taker and a spokesperson
  2. Identify a topic with a who, what, where, when. (5 minutes)
  3. Find out everything you can about this topic. Collect sources of information. Make note of your process and the standards you use to evaluate sources (15 minutes)
  4. We see the tip of the iceberg. What is below the surface?
  5. Report on 1, 2, 3.

References

Chatterjee, Partha. 2004. “Populations and Political Society.” In The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World, 27–51. New York: Columbia University Press.
Fraser, Nancy. 1992. “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy.” In Habermas and the Public Sphere, edited by Craig Calhoun, 109–42. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
———. 2008. “Abnormal Justice.” Critical Inquiry 34 (3): 393–422. https://doi.org/10.1086/589478.
Ginsburg, Ruth Bader. 1992. “Speaking in a Judicial Voice.” New York University Law Review 67 (6): 1185–1209.
Lino e Silva, Moises. 2025. “Post-Liberalism and the Politics of Liberation: Brazilian Favelas as Emergent Territories of Freedom.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 31 (4): 1023–40. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.14319.