From its earliest beginnings, even well before it developed as a formal discipline, anthropology’s primary concern and focus has been on learning about and documenting (human) social and cultural characteristics and on considering how they differ across space and time. Arising from that comparative concern was the principle of cultural relativism and, with it, an implication that anthropology’s primary value should be respect for all socio-cultural difference. Various critiques of the general principle of cultural relativism have produced a shift from uncritical to contextual and conjunctural cultural relativism. Those critiques arose especially when that principle has been used to justify reifications of socio-cultural difference – whether for purposes of deprecatory discrimination, of denying (or claiming) human rights or, in extreme cases, of vindicating violence, whether to resist or to impose oppressive policies and practices. The shift has entailed a refocus towards the contextual and diachronic complexity of how, when and especially why, notions of difference have been understood and used. The paper interrogates several cases where such reification has occurred. In doing that it reflects on the consequences of materialisations of socio-cultural difference and the extent to which those consequences do (or do not) result in the kinds of harm that most anthropological ethical guidelines and codes identify as off limits. The paper’s goal is to support an argument that anthropology’s primary value and ethical commitment is, and should be, to be able and ready to expose, and to make generally evident – especially beyond the confines of the anthropological community – the short-, medium- and long-term socio-political consequences of uses and abuses of reified difference, particularly when those (ab)uses result in harm being caused.