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)
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.