ANTH 3623: Reconciling justice with anthropology (Semester 1,
2026)
April 20, 2026
Main reading: Goodyear-Ka‘ōpua (2017); Ramones (2024)
Other reading: Davis (2021); Goodyear-Ka‘ōpua and Kuwada (2018)
This week’s topic connects with another theme of the class. Anthropology is a form of phronesis for radical, critical praxis. In that regard, it is also an exercise of imagination. Ethnographers observe, but also in observing must on the one hand adopt the perspective of those whom they want to understand through observation. This is an act of imagination, because it means adopting their social fictions, their games of “as if” in which their community’s conventions become like second nature. At the same time, anthropologists must also suspend these social fictions, recognizing them as fictions, and being open to the possibility of other fictions which would constitute a shared social reality on other terms. In this respect, anthropologists do what activists sometimes do to create change, which is to act as if it already existed, or prefigure the state toward which they work as a goal.
To connect this week’s topic to the work toward your final paper, think about how you would define the “topic” of each of the authors we read this week—their who, what, where, and when—and how different scholars from different backgrounds would see the same thing. What would stand out? What would not? How does one classify the kind of phenomena described by Goodyear-Ka‘ōpua and Ramones and how does it differ from others?