HUMANITY'S LAST STAND

In the face of intractable world-scale problems, an anthropologist and activist urges that they be reframed to include an “anthropological imagination.”

It’s inarguable that humankind faces overwhelming challenges, from Covid-19 to climate change, that seemingly resist solutions. Schuller, a winner of the Margaret Mead Award and the Anthropology in Media Award, deconstructs several problem areas that look a little different when seen through a different lens. For instance, he counsels the development of “radical empathy,” which demands that we see the other as being something other than an enemy or someone to loathe or fear. The author argues that “we are all queer to someone else” and “that it might just be our way of life that is strange, that needs to change.” In the face of systemic dehumanization, in short, Schuller insists that we see people as people, if people different from us. His observation that his vaunted “anthropological imagination” is a needed means to understand that “global capitalism is not just an economic system; it is also a political system and a moral system” may be a touch misplaced (tell it to Antonio Gramsci), and it will come as no surprise that this system has produced astonishing levels of inequality. Schuller’s assertion that White supremacy and capitalism are conjoined could use further development, but his invitation to use anthropology to imagine new ways of organizing society and economics is well taken. It’s unlikely that the book is going to make any Heritage Foundation reading lists, given characteristic sentences such as this: “We can see that the roots of climate change are anchored within the global economic order and the racism inherent to it, needed to justify the widescale murder, theft, forced removal, and enslavement necessary to make it run.”

There’s not much new here, though the anthropologically inclined will appreciate the effort.