Course description

As the global dominance of liberal norms fades, authoritarian populism and nationalism has returned. Yet many other societies have instead turned to values of sovereignty, solidarity, and vulnerability to imagine visions of freedom based on interdependence. Anthropologists have always promoted pluralism, yet remain embedded in Western ideas of humanism. What role should anthropology play at a time when ideas of justice are in dispute? This class examines cases of radical social, ethical, and political reimagination—including postconflict transition, truth-telling, abolitionism, and reparative justice, as well as reactionary new nationalisms—to ask what anthropology we need for a just world.

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Teaching staff

Coordinator:

Ryan Schram
ryan.schram@sydney.edu.au
Social Sciences Building, Room 410

Assignments summary

Title Due date Points Weight Length Hurdle task
Reflective “quiz” on personal values March 13 100 10% 250
Weekly writing assignments weekly 100 10% 1000
Critical essay: What does your anthropology want? April 3 100 25% 1000
Preliminary research exercise: Brainstorming research questions May 1 100 10% 500
Research essay: Anthropology as a science of human possibilities May 29 100 35% 2500 Yes
Oral “examination” (Interactive presentation) May 29 100 10% 750 Yes

Weekly schedule

Week Date Topic and reading(s)
1 February 23 What would a new anthropology look like? / Antrosio (2013); Wheeler (2017)
2 March 2 Anthropology before and after the liberal settlement / Evans-Pritchard (1940); Bohannan (2018) / Mazzarella (2019)
3 March 9 The anthropology of anarchy / Graeber (2007b); Overing (2003) / Graeber (2004); Kropotkin et al. (2021)
4 March 16 Do humans have rights? / Holcombe (2015); Levitt and Merry (2009); Merry (2006); Riles (2006)
5 March 23 Human rights and human relations / Demian (2011); Robbins (2009); Sarma Bhagabati (2025)
6 March 30 The new abolitionists / Lloyd (2025); Terwiel (2025) / Heynen (2021); Luke and Heynen (2020); Vega León (2025); Marx ([1843] 1978)
B April 6 Mandatory school closure in honor of Judeo-Christian festivals
7 April 13 The opposite of rights / Lino e Silva (2025)
8 April 20 Prefiguring alternative futures / Goodyear-Ka‘ōpua (2017); Ramones (2024) / Davis (2021); Goodyear-Ka‘ōpua and Kuwada (2018)
9 April 27 Alternatives to egalitarianism / Haruyama (2024) / Ferguson (2013); Graeber (2007a)
10 May 4 Repugnant others / Rosa and Bonilla (2017); Rosa and Díaz (2020) / da Silva and Larkins (2019)
11 May 11 Does everyone deserve sympathy, empathy, loyalty? / Teitelbaum (2019); Açıksöz (2024) / Harding (1991); Harding (2021); Pasieka (2017); Gusterson (2017); Pinheiro-Machado and Scalco (2021); Salem (2024)
12 May 18 Who is innocent? / Ticktin (2017) / Edmonds (2024); Hussain (2022)
13 May 25 Student presentations
14 June 1 Reading week
15 June 8 Final exam period

References

Açıksöz, Salih Can. 2024. “Ethnographic Betrayals.” Current Anthropology 65 (S26): 91–105. https://doi.org/10.1086/732089.
Antrosio, Jason. 2013. “Anthropology Will Only Matter If It Evokes a Purpose Outside of Itself.” Living Anthropologically (blog). September 5, 2013. https://www.livinganthropologically.com/purpose-of-anthropology/.
Bohannan, Paul. 2018. Justice and Judgment Among the Tiv. London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781351037303.
Davis, Sasha. 2021. “Beyond Obstruction: Blockades as Productive Reorientations.” Antipode, March, 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12722.
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.
Edmonds, Alexander. 2024. “Anthropology and Complicated People.” American Ethnologist 51 (1): 57–62. https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.13248.
Evans-Pritchard, E. E. 1940. “The Nuer of Southern Sudan.” In African Political Systems, 272–96. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Ferguson, James. 2013. “Declarations of Dependence: Labour, Personhood, and Welfare in Southern Africa.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 19 (2): 223–42. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.12023.
Goodyear-Ka‘ōpua, Noelani. 2017. “Protectors of the Future, Not Protestors of the Past: Indigenous Pacific Activism and Mauna a Wākea.” South Atlantic Quarterly 116 (1): 184–94. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-3749603.
Goodyear-Ka‘ōpua, Noelani, and Bryan Kamaoli Kuwada. 2018. “Making ‘Aha: Independent Hawaiian Pasts, Presents & Futures.” Daedalus 147 (2): 49–59. https://doi.org/10.1162/DAED_a_00489.
Graeber, David. 2004. Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-fragments-of-an-anarchist-anthropology.
———. 2007a. “Oppression.” In Possibilities: essays on hierarchy, rebellion and desire, 255–98. Edinburgh: AK Press.
———. 2007b. “Provisional Autonomous Zone: Or, the Ghost-State in Madagascar.” In Possibilities: essays on hierarchy, rebellion and desire, 157–80. Edinburgh: AK Press.
Gusterson, Hugh. 2017. “From Brexit to Trump: Anthropology and the Rise of Nationalist Populism.” American Ethnologist 44 (2): 209–14. https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.12469.
Harding, Susan. 1991. “Representing Fundamentalism: The Problem of the Repugnant Cultural Other.” Social Research 58 (2): 373–93. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40970650.
———. 2021. “Getting Things Back to Normal: Populism, Fundamentalism and Liberal Desire.” Social Anthropology 29 (2): 310–15. https://doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.13042.
Haruyama, Justin. 2024. “Anti-Blackness and Moral Repair: The Curse of Ham, Biblical Kinship, and the Limits of Liberalism.” Cultural Anthropology 39 (1): 118–45. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca39.1.06.
Heynen, Nik. 2021. ““A Plantation Can Be a Commons”: Re-Earthing Sapelo Island Through Abolition Ecology.” Antipode 53 (1): 95–114. https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12631.
Holcombe, Sarah. 2015. “The Revealing Processes of Interpretation: Translating Human Rights Principles into Pintupi-Luritja.” The Australian Journal of Anthropology 26 (3): 428–41. https://doi.org/10.1111/taja.12152.
Hussain, Salman. 2022. “Witnessing “Imperfect Victims”.” American Ethnologist 49 (1): 92–103. https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.13054.
Kropotkin, Peter, N. O. Bonzo, David Graeber, Andrej Grubačić, Ruth Kinna, Allan Antliff, and GATS. 2021. Mutual Aid: An Illuminated Factor of Evolution. Oakland, UNITED STATES: PM Press. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/usyd/detail.action?docID=6645883.
Levitt, Peggy, and Sally Merry. 2009. “Vernacularization on the Ground: Local Uses of Global Women’s Rights in Peru, China, India and the United States.” Global Networks 9 (4): 441–61. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1471-0374.2009.00263.x.
Lino e Silva, Moises. 2025. “Post-Liberalism and the Politics of Liberation: Brazilian Favelas as Emergent Territories of Freedom.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 31 (4): 1023–40. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.14319.
Lloyd, Vincent. 2025. “Abolition, Destruction, Decolonization.” Social Research: An International Quarterly 92 (4): 941–64. https://doi.org/10.1353/sor.2025.a981024.
Luke, Nikki, and Nik Heynen. 2020. “Community Solar as Energy Reparations: Abolishing Petro-Racial Capitalism in New Orleans.” American Quarterly 72 (3): 603–25. https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/article/765825.
Marx, Karl. (1843) 1978. “On the Jewish question.” In The Marx-Engels reader, edited by Robert C. Tucker, 26–52. New York: Norton. http://archive.org/details/marxengelsreader00tuck.
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.
Merry, Sally Engle. 2006. “Transnational Human Rights and Local Activism: Mapping the Middle.” American Anthropologist 108 (1): 38–51. https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.2006.108.1.38.
Overing, Joanna. 2003. “In Praise of the Everyday: Trust and the Art of Social Living in an Amazonian Community.” Ethnos 68 (3): 293–316. https://doi.org/10.1080/0014184032000134469.
Pasieka, Agnieszka. 2017. “Taking Far-Right Claims Seriously and Literally: Anthropology and the Study of Right-Wing Radicalism.” Slavic Review 76 (S1): S19–29. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26564942.
Pinheiro-Machado, Rosana, and Lucia Scalco. 2021. “Humanising Fascists? Nuance as an Anthropological Responsibility.” Social Anthropology 29 (2): 329–36. https://doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.13048.
Ramones, Ikaika. 2024. “‘Insurgent Indigeneity’: A New Threshold of Indigenous Politics.” American Quarterly 76 (3): 567–90. https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/article/937118.
Riles, Annelise. 2006. “Anthropology, Human Rights, and Legal Knowledge: Culture in the Iron Cage.” Cornell Law Faculty Publications, March. https://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/facpub/991.
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.
Rosa, Jonathan, and Yarimar Bonilla. 2017. “Deprovincializing Trump, Decolonizing Diversity, and Unsettling Anthropology.” American Ethnologist 44 (2): 201–8. https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.12468.
Rosa, Jonathan, and Vanessa Díaz. 2020. “Raciontologies: Rethinking Anthropological Accounts of Institutional Racism and Enactments of White Supremacy in the United States.” American Anthropologist 122 (1): 120–32. https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.13353.
Salem, Tomás. 2024. “Grappling With Complexity in Research with the Military Police The Far-Right and Anthropology’s Civilizing Mission.” Vibrant: Virtual Brazilian Anthropology 21: e211009. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1590/1809-43412024v21e211009.
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.
Silva, Antonio José Bacelar da, and Erika Robb Larkins. 2019. “The Bolsonaro Election, Antiblackness, and Changing Race Relations in Brazil.” The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology 24 (4): 893–913. https://doi.org/10.1111/jlca.12438.
Teitelbaum, Benjamin R. 2019. “Collaborating with the Radical Right: Scholar-Informant Solidarity and the Case for an Immoral Anthropology.” Current Anthropology, June. https://doi.org/10.1086/703199.
Terwiel, Anna. 2025. “Alligator Alcatraz and the Environmental Politics of Prison Abolition.” Social Research: An International Quarterly 92 (4): 1043–67. https://doi.org/10.1353/sor.2025.a981028.
Ticktin, Miriam. 2017. “A World Without Innocence.” American Ethnologist 44 (4): 577–90. https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.12558.
Vega León, Ricardo. 2025. “The Tensions of Abolitionism and Racial Capitalism.” Social Research: An International Quarterly 92 (4): 915–40. https://doi.org/10.1353/sor.2025.a981023.
Wheeler, Ryan. 2017. “Ruth Benedict and the Purpose of Anthropology.” The Peabody (blog). January 14, 2017. https://peabody.andover.edu/2017/01/14/ruth-benedict-and-the-purpose-of-anthropology/.