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An Anthropologist Defines Social Justice PDF
An Anthropologist Defines Social Justice PDF
An Anthropologist Defines Social Justice PDF
Definition:
Built into the architecture of modern Euro-American socio-cultural and economic structures is a
cumulative bias for certain groups and worldviews over others. This bias resides in supposedly objective
and normative categories, processes and devices that cloak the workings of power under banners of
‘predisposed continuity’ (Williams 1994:600, Lazarus-Black 1997:628, Gramsci 1971); the guise of
policies and decision-making (Wright & Shore 1997); the norms of knowledge and science (Latour
2004a, 2004b, Martin 1991, Haraway 1997 Lloyd 1984); and within the complex assemblages of
material relations between actants, discourses and institutions (Martin 1994, Cockburn 1984, Harrison
Bias and structural constraints can be found in places such as a racially slanted legal system, the
sexual division of labour, wage inequality and a particular version of ‘liberal democracy’ predominating
western society and latterly the ‘globe’ (Latour 2004a:451). Present day majority rule for example is a
misnomer for authentic participatory democracy and denies Bakhtinian dialogism (Bakhtin 1981) where
many voices speak at once, and difference (Torres 2004, Abu-Lughod 1990) not homogenised
community, nor sterile sociological cosmopolitanism (Stengers 1996, Latour 2004a:455), could become
transformative.
In order to engage social change, social justice is a method, discourse and critique of the bias and
power relations hidden in the social whirl, language and practice of everyday life (Gaudio 2003,
Bourdieu 1984, 1977, 1991, de Certeau 1984). As discourse it confronts oppression and domination
(Young 1990:39, O’Donnell, Chavez & Pruyn 2004) with intellectual projects whose loudest voices
began and are symbolised in gender (Cockburn 1988, Cocks 1989) and race (Omi & Winant 1994,
Brown et al 2002, West 2004), but continue to grow in many fields such as media and sexuality (Lash
2002, Lancaster 2003). As critique it interrogates the universal and reveals the western-white-male-
heterosexual privilege hidden within the increasingly oppressive and exclusionary system professed and
promoted by corporations, law courts, mass media, private education, government and beyond,
providing a lens for understanding the workings of multiple, intersecting and conflicting power
structures which are ‘local but tied to non-local systems’ (Abu-Lughod 1990:52).
Social justice is neither self-explanatory or to be mistaken for an older, more narrow concept
defined as the ‘distributive paradigm’ (Young 1990:15) institutionalised in such discourses as a ‘colour-
bind’ society (O’Donnell, Chavez & Pruyn 2004:8, Brown 2003, Omi & Winant 1994:1). My definition
sees social justice as a means for exposing positivist rationality (Hacking 1999:47) and social flaws
(Rubin & Rubin 1995:34) in order to weaken the institutional oppression and social domination
produced by mechanisms of exclusion such as the unequal access some groups and individuals have to
institutional resources based on their normative categorisation – class, gender, race etc. – in order to
promote actions and rights (Harrison 2003) that would eliminate those flaws.
Key Features:
• SELF-REFLEXIVITY: One of the key components of social justice is its ability to disrupt and displace
the certainties and orthodoxies that govern the present (Fox 1991). This involves processes already well-
known to the anthropologist like ‘exoticising the familiar’ (Bourdieu 1988) and ‘studying up’ (Nader
1972). However, in terms of social change and disrupting the ‘way things are’ self-reflexivity must also
Standing outside one’s own ‘cultural meaning systems’ and conceptual schemas is never
complete and the rules that shape reality are mostly quite unconscious. Nonetheless, to dissolve the
meaning and security of one’s own moral universe and societal norms requires a self-conscious
detachment and movement away from the customs and categories of one’s own everyday thought (Shore
& Wright 1997:17). Such intellectual clarity, while never complete, is the starting point in the
• CRITICAL LISTENING: While the postmodernist turn and poetics of Marcus and Fischer (1986) and
the polyphony of the ‘Writing Culture’ school (Clifford & Marcus 1986) offered minimal engagement
and space to disenfranchised voices, social justice, in order to provide knowledge and voice to the
oppressed, necessitates becoming a critical listener whose central focus is the side of the oppressed
(Rubin & Rubin 1995) and who can provide disenfranchised groups with not-only access to ‘experts’
(Young 1990) and fields, but the correct audiences to which these voices must be directed.
institutions and the expansion of deliberative democracy (Young 1990, O’Donnell, Chavez & Pruyn
2004). Inclusive politics require new forms of public debate involving criticism and communication
between public officials and citizens, which is not paternalistic and top-down, but rather a form of
reasonable conversation leading to the solution of collective problems and significant social changes
(Young 2000:52, Freire 1999:133). It must ensure the participation and equal weight of victims of
injustice (Torres 2004:15) in a dialogical (Bakhtin 1981) process and engender a responsibility to be
• SOCIAL CHANGE: As Bruno Latour recognises we must be aware of the hidden hegemony of the
practice of democracy itself, which in its current western form of ‘liberal democracy,’ is actually a
system of elite control with minimal public ratification (Chomsky 2000). Even with a genuine ‘radical
democracy’ founded on the regular and constant involvement of all participants we cannot forget that
with democracy arrive institutions, forms of life, habits, media, courts, values, feelings all of which have
A central feature of social justice must then be social change. Current liberal democracy is not
the ‘holy grail’ of social justice, rather, new ways to consider and envision social congregation, and
hence democracy, must be constructed together. These new assemblies must entail a rejection of the
anthropocentric prejudices and philosophies upon which the human position and conception of the world
embrace, literally, everything – including all the vast numbers of non-human entities such as ideas,
conventions, rules and tangible matter making humans act (Latour 2002:454, O’Donnell, Chavez and
Pruyn 2004:8). Actor Network Theory (Strathern 1999) because it is neutral with regard to human and
non-human actants in a network is an example of a framework providing a series of tricks to aid this
project (Latour 1999) – it allows researchers to analyse relationships and underlying mechanisms that
• TEACHING: How do you interface social justice with local reality? Much of my definition has hinged
on different and new modes of thinking about the world, however, without a teaching component social
justice becomes a ‘white,’ ‘ivory tower’ activity whose service becomes negligible (Spivak 1999), and
A central component concerns how social justice is applied locally and to the benefit of those
affected by injustices. Teaching for social justice implies speaking persuasively in a context where
people do not have the obligation to agree and participate, and may like or dislike the issue at hand
(Torres 2004:25). It implies not only teaching students to critically examine how and why social
arrangements of society benefit one group over another (Young 1990) but also teaching students to
implement and act on such knowledge (Torres 2004:15). This involves developing a viewpoint in
1
Cosmopolitics are discourses and modes of doing politics that are concerned with their global reach and impact and are
embedded in conflicts regarding the role of difference and diversity in the construction of polities (Stengers 1996).
Simone de Beauvoir & Feminism: A central feature of my social justice concept is reflexivity and a
concern with difference. In order to destabilise the idea of society as a unified whole anthropological
reflexivity needs to make the social, cultural and historical arrangements beneath commonsensical
structures visible. Social justice involves making them historically peculiar (Rabinow 1986) and
demonstrating reality to be a construct of discourse (Foucault 1980:119), this move can highlight the
structural inequalities embedded in the ‘passive’ everyday relations people have with each other and
society.
I use de Beauvoir’s social constructionism to symbolise the inspiration for this canon and
perspective; and I disagree with a ‘Writing Culture’ school critique (Clifford & Marcus 1986) of the
incidentally excludes feminist and non-western writers from their book (Probyn 1993:66). Instead I
consider feminism rather than postmodernism as the site from which reflexivity and the crisis of
In simplistic terms this reflexive turn can be represented by de Beauvoir’s famous line “On ne
naît pas femme: on le devient” (“one is not born, but rather becomes a woman) (de Beauvoir 1949
[1953]:267), but has more recent feminist proponents and detractors in Irigaray 1985, Butler 1990,
Cockburn 1988, Cocks 1989, Shostak 1981, Braidotti 1994, Haraway 1997, Strathern 1987, Harding
1987.
My notion of reflexivity is hence tied to a feminist cultural critique concerned with the neglect of
women‘s experience in the discipline (Moore 1988:1). This move disrobed unrepresentative
texts and theories as based on and against experiences that from the outset were an unrepresentative
subset of human experiences, not only in terms of gender, but also in terms of class, race and culture
(Nelson 1996:292).
constructionism and reflexivity, with postmodernism. This is because I heed feminist philosopher of
sexual difference Adriana Cavarero (1995) when she warns against being easily seduced by the mirage
of a ‘feminised’ postmodern male philosophy whose arrival and timing could itself be the hidden
figuration of western hegemonic power (Berger 1993:178). Is it not strange that just at the time “when
women and non-western peoples have begun to speak for themselves and, indeed, to speak about global
systems of power differentials” (Mascia-Lees, Sharpe and Cohen 1989:14-15) that the western white
male, who has traditionally commanded the authority to produce knowledge, claims that there is no truth
to be found? (Clough 2000:113). Furthermore as Braidotti (1995:xvi) reminds us, a wilful displacement
of the classical teleological route of thought through a carefully planned derailing of the patriarchal train
of thought (Lloyd 1984:104) that analyses contemporary material experience is possible without a call to
postmodernism
From feminism my definition learns to deny the ‘universal’ subject of knowledge, marking it as a
falsely generalised standpoint, and demonstrates that discourses of science, religion, law, and the general
assumptions that govern the production of knowledge tacitly imply a subject that is male, white, middle-
class and heterosexual (Braidotti 1993:322). Such reflexivity acknowledges the material conditions
involved in experience, providing a heuristic of culture where there is “recognition of the respect due to
the infinite singularity of each and everyone; a combination of multiplicity and interconnection, which
defies easy dichotomies and allows voices, echoes, and traces to emerge” (Braidotti 1995:xviii).
Race: Authors such as Harrison (1995, 2005), Brown (2002), West (2004) and Smedley (1998)
demonstrate how racism can quite often be polite, implicit, normal and unintentional (Brown 2002:43),
i.e. embedded in the social and not the individuals intent or actions. As such “racism can be reproduced
and sustained in the absence of race-centered prejudice” (Harrison 2005:9). This is an important
conclusion that promotes the necessity of critical listening in the social justice project.
For example neoliberalism (Harvey 2006) and its onus on individual attitudes and values in the
quest for success diverts attention away from cumulative structural inequalities such as unequal access
to economic or social capital (Bourdeiu 1984:114). It obscures the white-privilege so woven into
unexamined institutional practices, habits of mind, and received truths (Brown 2002:4). It makes it
possible to perpetuate racial domination without making any reference to race at all (Gaudio &
Bialostok 2005:53), and in effect denies that “the dominant political and economic system in the United
States (and elsewhere) is structured by race – that it is, in fact, racist” (ibid:54).
evidence of hierarchies (Brown 2002:27) rooted in social institutions and modes of thought, thereby
stressing the obligation to critically listen to the lived experiences of all groups in society and their
Mikhail Bakhtin: A nuance to Bakhtin’s thought I identify with and consider important to social justice
are the forms of oppression operating in everyday language exchange, i.e. subtle face-to-face forms of
discursive interaction (Stam 1989:8). Bakhtin’s language orientated view of social practice, like the
production hermeneutic of Deleuze and Guattari (1984:4), brings discursive actuality to everyday life
The advantage of his categories as has been pointed out by Stam (1989) and Young (1983) is that
they are equally applicable to art and to life. This provides an interpretative method of cultural analysis
beyond structural concepts and hence provides creative ways to get at meaning construction that
hegemonic discourses might otherwise obscure. For example ‘polyphony’ (Bakhtin 1984a) can describe
a novel, a poem or an entire culture; ‘carnival’ (1984) is both real-world social practice, a form of
popular culture and textual manifestation; ‘heteroglossia’ (1981) can be a textual, linguistic or social
reality; and ‘dialogism’ (1981) is the array of voices both verbal and non-verbal and their relation to one
Thus in Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (1984a) Bakhtin foreshadowed social justice ideas on
difference and inclusive politics by noting the lack of homogenous style, univocal meaning or vertical
hierarchy between voices. Transferred to the contemporary social realm this is a reality of diversity and
in the context of social justice, ‘dialogism’ becomes the propensity for a plurality of different, unmerged
voices (Limon 1989) and consciousnesses, to be heard in the democratic process and be given equal
Cris Shore & Susan Wright: These two professors the first from Goldsmiths where I did my MA and
the second from Sussex where I did my BA wrote a book together called The Anthropology of Policy.
This work presents policies as complex assemblages that categorise the individual as ‘subject’, ‘citizen’,
‘professional’, ‘national’, ‘criminal’ and ‘deviant’ (Shore and Wright 1997:4). Policy and decision-
making once supposedly neutral and objective are revealed as devices through which the maintenance of
societal inequalities is achieved and the human agency and politics behind the decision-making process
obscured. Their teachings taught me how to take anthropological knowledge and apply it, a key
Malinowski’s notion of myth (1926) in Trobriand society, Victor Turner’s ‘dominant symbols
(1967) in his study of Ndembu ritual, Schneider’s ‘core symbols’ (1968) in his study of American
kinship – all analytical keys for understanding entire cultural systems and their underlying elements
(Shore and Wright 1997:8) are paralleled by policies, because they too have important economic, legal,
cultural and moral implications, and create whole new sets of relationships between individuals, groups
and objects.
My definition of social justice calls for high theory to be grounded and applied in social life; the
anthropology of policy teaches how to take traditional anthropological theory and apply it. Unmasking
the modern social mechanisms for hiding subjective, ideological and irrational goals (Shore &
Wright:11) and increasing engagement in the policy process by the popular masses, are both serious
threats to current biased processes of power and governance, and central to social justice.
Bruno Latour: From Latour my definition learns an analogy for the construction of knowledge
(Hacking 1999). In scientific practice naked access to truth is not possible it must always be mediated
through statements and entities like citations, equipment, reputation and laboratories (Latour & Woolgar
1986). For example a microbe (which we do not dispute exists) is not visible without a microscope (a
human fabrication), and a fact (like the microbe) does not become so without negotiating the nexus
between fact and construction, or in other words gaining credibility from a group of peers, through
scholarly publication or successful grant application (Latour 2004a:459). The establishment of scientific
facts like the establishment of discourses and cultural knowledge is a social process (Martin 1994:6) it is
never passive, objective or an ahistorical truth. They all exist, rise and fall on historical and intercultural
Felix Guattari: Conceptual innovators like Guattari and other post-structuralist thinkers provide my
definition with its radical edge. These philosophers (Spinoza, Deleuze amongst others), social scientists
(CLR James to name a personal favourite) and cultural theorists (Paul Virilio, Scott Lash, Rem
Koolhaus who speak to the 21st century condition) provide ideas and material to liberate human thinking
from the dominant cultural model and provide avenues of social change.
The Three Ecologies (Guattari 1989), which I consider a manifesto for social justice and change,
is premised on thinking differently about the distinction between nature and culture. It does this by
teaching about the cultural specificity of concepts, symbols and meanings. Redefining ecology to allow
the spheres of the subject, society and the environment to mix and merge into each other and noting “it
is quite simply wrong to regard action on the psyche, the socius, and the environment as separate”
(1989:134). Contained within this work is also a vibrant critique of Integrated World Capitalism (IWC)
and its ‘exploitative practices’ that perpetuate ‘quiet violence’ on vulnerable groups (1989:135). Guattari
illuminates thinking on ‘possible escape routes from contemporary history,’ and presumes work towards
While I do not believe that the eradication of all the fantasies that lead to the objectification of
women, races, sexualities etc. is simply a project of philosophy, Guattari and others are still central to
my definition of social justice because they believe in a different world distinct to neo-liberalism,
capitalism and nation states. This is an important part of social justice because the ways we imagine or
fail to envision the future, will always influence the present and how it will actually take shape
(Heidegger 1996, Tan 2006), i.e. it prepares us for what is, and what is not, possible (Jameson, 1982:
150).
USEFULNESS:
In a recent research project I investigated racism on reality TV (Kerrigan 2006). This project disclosed
the subtle, and not so subtle ways segregation and white privilege is fed to, digested and contested by the
viewing public. Applying my social justice definition described in this 2nd comp paper, to a wider
project relating to the institutional production practices behind TV programming – how they are
established – and the structure of relations within TV stations could demonstrate the ways in which
injustices become naturalised and part of social fabric on a level my study of race on TV was unable to
fully articulate.
Critical listening would analyse how the programs are received. What do different groups in
society think of the ways they are portrayed and stereotyped? What would they consider a way to
resolve this simplification of difference and elimination of heterogeneity? By using the concept of
dialogism inclusive politics could demonstrate the inadequacy of the production process, unhealthy
ownership concentration in the media, the limited number of voices involved in the decision-making
wealth, the dominance of advertising and public relations executives, and the vertical hierarchy ethos of
Reflexivity would try to get at the relationships within TV companies as well as with their
viewers and sponsors. It could analyse language, symbols, meanings and demonstrate the power to
sustain privilege hidden within the taken-for-granted (Gramsci 1971:12, Boggs 1984:159, Cocks
Teaching could bring the material of popular culture, the shows and ways of life younger
members of society view with token critique into the classroom, picking some of the most popular
shows and breaking down their production on every level from corporate philosophy to language use. It
would also provide a space to discuss new types of programs people might want to see and lead to forms
of action to see those changes brought about. Social change and pushing the boundaries of everyday
Another way, I would like to use this social definition is in the writing of fiction. My idea would
be to write a novel whose central character has a prophet-like perception for the structural relations
behind social inequalities. Using the tools of anthropology and elements of my social justice definition
the character would describe how hierarchies are produced and sustained, explaining how racism works,
how neoliberalism dominates, and break down the power structures in society in ways that those the
The reason I believe this to be a warranted use of social justice is it can make the intellectual and
academic knowledge ‘we’ produce, in itself a creator of social injustices because not everyone has equal
Application and teaching as previously noted are central tenants of social justice and achieving
social change. By making the knowledge we attain ‘popular’ we provide the tools for transformation.
The field of anthropology is itself a discourse and practice complicit in the conspiracy of social capital,
regardless of our propensity for self-reflection. Therefore as anthropologists of ‘Race, Gender and Social
Justice’ we most constantly look for ways of levelling the unequal playing fields of the social world.
Fiction, popular culture, TV, modern media – these are all areas where the transference of expert
knowledge may prove most successful and engender social change. They are the same interfaces
currently used by those in power now. Anthropology with attitude, as I believe social justice implies,
must not be naïve or shy in the face of such relationships, they might be one of the few spaces where the
Conclusion:
Any definition of social justice is itself problematic because it privileges certain approaches, knowledge
and worldviews thereby excluding others. Nonetheless I have tried to enter my understanding in a way
Social justice is a certain idealised condition distinct from the modern condition where all
members of a society will have the same basic rights, security, opportunities, obligations and social
benefits. It is a conversation and space where all persons and voices, even those of disagreement, can be
heard equally.
In order to work toward this we must break the social world as a normative grid whose
perspective of the privileged exists as universal and foregrounds the actualities of the various day-to-day
lives of the social majority. Social justice is about rights and difference. It is about heterogeneity. On a
most basic level it reminds me of why as an 18 year old I chose anthropology for my future. Social
justice resonates with my idealised, yet reasoned, point of view from then, that everything can be
different.
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