What is this class about?

This class is very broad. It asks, “What is happening?” Although it is broad in scope, it is also very basic. Today, we see many different efforts to undo the contemporary global order. We hear a lot about reactionary nationalism. Yet there are also many efforts establish new, just, and genuinely cosmopolitan order. Anthropology can shed light on what motivates these calls for change and what kinds of alternatives people create.

However, as Nancy Fraser (2008) argues, today’s moment calls for “abnormal justice.” Abnormal justice is to the institutional order what a paradigm shift is to normal science: the basis for claims for abnormal justice come from outside the dominant framework of assumptions about what is right and wrong. Abnormal justice means learning a new language to talk about justice. It involves both contesting specific acts and contesting the normal way we perceive, classify, and conceptualize those acts. Unlike movements for equality and inclusion, which appeal to shared ideas of what is right and fair, people today seek to challenge both their oppression and the norms which legitimate that oppression. Abnormal justice is a paradox; it seeks accountability for injuries among people who do not have the same ideas of what counts as injury or who should be accountable. In that sense also abnormal justice is potentially world making too. So, this is also a class on the anthropology of abnormal justice. It asks what we can learn from societies in transition and groups that seek abolition, reconstruction, or revolution.

Demands for abnormal justice require people expand their imagination of what counts as justice, and specifically to expand their imagination of people’s responsibilities to each other. Anthropology is very good at helping expand their imagination. We suspend what is familiar and embrace what is strange. Indeed, the struggle for alternatives has often turned to the science of human possibility. Contemporary efforts to challenge the normal discourse of justice, rights, and power are often informed by ideas first developed by anthropologists and grounded in their research on the experiences of marginalized people. The radicalism of early anthropology continues to be a source for contemporary forms of radical thought. In that sense, this isn’t just a class in the anthropology of inequality, the anthropology of social movements, or even the anthropology of radical politics. Anthropology as a way of thinking is well suited to thinking about what is unique about today’s moment because anthropology’s normal science has always been abnormal. So this class is also about the dialogue between anthropology and radical thought. Yet, if this is a class about abnormal justice, then anthropology is implicated in the demands for change that it observes in another way. Anthropology is a product of and part of a specific philosophical, ideological, and political context. We no longer live in that context. So if today is an abnormal moment and needs abnormal discourse, then we have to ask what kind of anthropology is needed now. If you could reestablish anthropology today, what would you create?

Anthropology’s knowledge, like any kind of knowledge, implies a praxis. We even have a slogan for our default ethical and political position: We “make the world safe for human differences”.¹ At the dawn of cultural anthropology in the early 20th century, this commitment to human equality was still a radical idea. A person’s differences, even those that make one incomprehensible to the other, should not preclude one from the status of full humanity, because each person is also a product of an environment in which they acquire their full humanity when they acquire a specific culture of their own community. Furthermore, people’s cultural differences cannot be reduced to universal categories or explanations without imposing one culture’s biases on other people, so the status of humanity can never be conferred by another who deems the other sufficiently human. Hence, to treat someone as an equal, one must adopt their perspective on themselves. It is only in their framework of ideas and values that their version of their humanity is understandable. If each person is the only real authority on their own experiences, then anthropology as a science of humanity has to start from listening to and empathy with an other, rather than reliance on one’s own sense of what is normal and universal. While a relativist position may effectively challenge some forms of supremacism and racism, it leaves one unable to formulate a praxis on which one responds to other kinds of domination. Hostility toward or bias against difference is not always the leading feature of domination, especially when that domination is systemic or structural. Likewise, cultivating empathy or awareness of different perspectives, or even an awareness of one’s own situated perspective, is not a cure for many kinds of marginalization or subordination. Anthropology can provide many tools for today’s quest for abnormal justice, but we must ask if an ethical and political praxis shaped by one era is suited for another.

All of this is to say that the title of this class—Reconciling justice with anthropology—has a double meaning. You can use anthropology to advocate for justice. You can use anthropology to argue for the equal worth of all people. Yet when the justice one seeks is abnormal, then one has to ask how we can adapt anthropology to an absence of shared norms. How do we advocate for equality when no one agrees on the concept of equality? We use anthropology to learn about how to change the world, but we also ask what kind of anthropology we need, and what kind of anthropology we would create if we were to found it all over again, now, at a time of perpetual crisis and incomplete transformation.

How this class will work

Like many classes at the upper undergraduate level, this class is organized as a seminar, and thus centers on an open discussion among students. I provide guidance to the discussion. I will not, however, give any lectures in this class.² Each week we will come together to help make collective progress. What we do in class will be a little different each week. In many weeks, we will work together to understand a set of ideas in assigned readings better. In some weeks, the focus will be on discussing how anthropologists have applied the network paradigm in an ethnographic study. In other weeks, students will work in small groups on a task that helps you with your final project. And in at least one week, we will be pulling things together so we can move on to a new topic.

Every week, we will know if we have done a good job if:

1. students have done most of the talking, and
2. everyone in the class has had a chance to ask questions and contribute their ideas.

Your participation in discussion is, in that sense, something you do for your fellow students. By offering your views, especially to people who disagree with you, you help them to reflect critically on their own reasoning. Likewise, when you seek out the perspectives of other people, you are able to become aware of your own thought processes. This is ultimately what you will take away from this class: an understanding of your own perspective, rather than familiarity with the ideas of major theories.

Everyone has a first seminar. For some students, open participation in a class is totally new, and can be unfamiliar and even uncomfortable. Part of making a seminar successful is helping everyone feel like they can join in, even when it’s their first seminar class ever. Discussion is important to this class—and sometimes it’s a part of your grade—but I am not assuming that it will come easy to everyone. What I expect is that each person try their best, and keep trying. What you can expect from me and from your fellow students is that we will all help make the class comfortable and welcoming to everyone’s participation.

Because an open seminar discussion can be hard at first, I want to build in various formats for class discussion and link them to assignments. So, for instance, on weeks where the main objective is to develop a purely abstract understanding of a complex system of thinking, the weekly writing assignment for that week ask you to interpret a passage from the assigned reading. Other class activities will be tied to work you are doing on your final project. I even have something like a scavenger hunt in mind for one week.

If your active verbal class participation is not possible, you can also talk to me about other ways you can participate in class.