Towards an Ecumenical Anthropology João de Pina-Cabral School of Anthropology and Conservation University of Kent May 2015 This paper was written for the collection “Who are ‘We’? Reimagining Alterity and Affinity in Anthropology” edited by Liana Chua (Brunel U.) and Nayanika Mathur (Cambridge U.). The growth of Anthropology as an academic discipline in the mid-nineteenth century was founded on Darwin’s major challenge to Christian principles of human exceptionalism, part of the project of an emergent “natural history”. Nevertheless, an ethical awareness of the essential unicity of humankind never stopped being a central assumption. Without it, we would not have today’s anthropology. As a matter of fact, one of the best informed observers of our discipline sustains that the origins of social anthropology are to be found not in universities, where it later established itself with figures like Hatton, Tylor, and Boas, but in a series of private learning bodies that, in the second half of the nineteenth century, worked at conjoining natural history “with a moral revulsion against slavery” (Needham 1981: 11). Those engaging in disciplinary history all too often forget that modernist social anthropology was built upon this moral ground. The revulsion against the way in which modern slavery countered the unique way in which humanity matters to all humans remained a central consideration throughout, both in anthropology and in its sister discipline of history. We should not forget, for example, that Franz Baermann Steiner’s DPhil thesis, defended in Oxford in 1952, was precisely dealing with slavery, and that his humanist thinking on the notion of “value” was central to the development of the work of some of the most influential thinkers in anthropology in the second half of the century: Mary Douglas, M.N. Srinivas, Louis Dumont, Julian Pitt-Rivers, Laura and Paul Bohannan. 1 Indeed, it is arguable that, in the latter quarter of the century, theoretical feminism was an heir to this same ethical drive (e.g. Ardener 1975). 1 See the Introductions to Steiner’s work by Mary Douglas, M.N. Srinivas, Jeremy Adler and Richard Fardon (1999, I: 3-102 and 1999, II: 3-106).