Justice and anthropology Class notes

Week 5: Human rights and human relations

Ryan Schram

March 23, 2026

Week 5: Human rights and human relations

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

Main reading: Demian (2011); Robbins (2009); Sarma Bhagabati (2025)

Notes

When judges in a Tiv village settle a case, they are repairing the tar, the shared territory of one community (Bohannan 2018). They practice just one example of what today people might call “restorative justice” in which parties in a conflict in the presence of and with the facilitation of the whole community work to restore an equilibrium and to create peace (Braithwaite 1999). It is a kind of judgment without a concept of guilt or innocence, or victim and perpetrator, at least in the sense of these concepts in a punitive system of criminal law. Restorative justice is not new and not even really rare. What if we are wrong to think of it as a cultural construction of justice? Can there be another kind of justice in which what is rendered what is due is not people but relationships?

References

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

Braithwaite, John. 1999. “Restorative Justice: Assessing Optimistic and Pessimistic Accounts.” Crime and Justice: A Review of Research 25: 1–128. https://heinonline.org/HOL/P?h=hein.journals/cjrr25&i=7.

Demian, Melissa. 2011. “`Hybrid Custom’ and Legal Description in Papua New Guinea.” In Recasting Anthropological Knowledge: Inspiration and Social Science, edited by Jeanette Edwards and Maja Petrović-Šteger, 49–69. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Robbins, Joel. 2009. “Recognition, Reciprocity, and Justice: Melanesian Reflections on the Rights of Relationships.” In Mirrors of Justice: Law and Power in the Post-Cold War Era, edited by Kamari Maxine Clarke and Mark Goodale, 171–90. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511657511.010.

Sarma Bhagabati, Dikshit. 2025. “Human Rights as a Claim for Recognition: Towards an Ecumenical Anthropology of Dignity and Personhood.” Thesis Eleven 187 (1): 72–93. https://doi.org/10.1177/07255136241308888.