Justice and anthropology Class notes

Week 2: Anthropology before and after the liberal settlement

Ryan Schram

March 2, 2026

Week 2: Anthropology before and after the liberal settlement

ANTH 3623: Reconciling justice with anthropology (Semester 1, 2026)
March 2, 2026

Main reading: Evans-Pritchard (1940); Bohannan (2018)

Other reading: Mazzarella (2019)

Notes

Anthropology is born in Europe and the European intellectual tradition. It takes flight from this origin to develop new versions of a critical tradition of European thought which was skeptical of progress or modernity. The societies outside of Europe that most interested early thinkers in anthropology were societies based on kinship, and represented for them a fundamentally different basis for society. The main difference was that these societies lacked a state… and were fine that way. The statelessness of acephalous societies was not a lack or a deficit but was, in the right light, a demonstration of the capacity for communities to govern themselves. This anarchist element in anthropology was important to early British social anthropologists and has been revived by Joanna Overing and David Graeber among others. Should anthropologists renew their contribution to a theory of anarchism?

References

Bohannan, Paul. 2018. Justice and Judgment Among the Tiv. London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781351037303.

Evans-Pritchard, E. E. 1940. “The Nuer of Southern Sudan.” In African Political Systems, 272–96. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Mazzarella, William. 2019. “The Anthropology of Populism: Beyond the Liberal Settlement.” Annual Review of Anthropology 48 (Volume 48, 2019): 45–60. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-102218-011412.