Mark Goodale

University of Lausanne | UNIL · Laboratory of Cultural and Social Anthropology (LACS)

This article uses reflections on chronopolitical praxis during the period 2006‐19 in Bolivia in order to make a more general contribution to the anthropology of time and temporalities. The article proposes the theoretical concept of ‘timerendering’ in order to examine the ways in which time emerged as a pervasive register that mediated and also dee...

This article examines the far-reaching implications of Sally Engle Merry’s seminal multi-sited research on human rights measurement and monitoring. As she argued, human rights indicators, which form the basis for measurement, depend upon a highly elaborate, and largely obscured, process of commensuration. Through commensuration, complex social, leg...

The salares, or salt flats, of Bolivia are the site of the world's largest proven reserves of lithium. Although different proposals were initiated over the decades, it was during the thirteen years (2006-2019) under the Movement to Socialism (MAS) governments of Evo Morales when the state-directed lithium project began in earnest. This is an ambiti...

This article uses the ethnography of the prelives of lithium industrialization in Bolivia to contribute to wider debates – in anthropology and beyond – about the essentially contested nature of the green energy transition. Based on research conducted between 2019 and 2023, the article examines the topographies of production and sociopolitical mobil...

The introduction to this special issue, Contesting Transitions: New Directions in the Anthropology of Energy, Climate Justice, and Resource Imaginaries, takes stock of the current state of debate within anthropology and allied fields over the contradictions, slippages, and inequalities at the centre of the global energy transition. Across a wide ra...

This book provides the first systematic assessment from a human rights law perspective of the landmark contributions of the renowned legal anthropologist, Sally Engle Merry. What impact does over-simplification have on human rights debates? The understandable tendency to present them as a single, universal, and immutable concept ignores their compl...

In considering the ways anthropological approaches to the future can help make sense of current debates around energy transition, it is important to understand that “the future” is not a singular temporal placeholder, a category that allows us to talk meaningfully about moments, or events, or epochs, or sequences of days, months, and years that mig...

Forthcoming contribution to the 30th anniversary "Frontiers of Social Inquiry" special issue with Social Research (December 2023). / ABSTRACT: If the central paradox of the High Anthropocene is that we are fated to imagine alternative (energy) futures that are at the same time impossible, then the task of anthropology should be to help to understan...

I recently experienced one of those unsettling, context-imposing moments that cause the ground underfoot to feel suddenly loose, threatening to dissolve into quicksand – until, that is, the moment passes, as it inevitably seems to do. It happened during a university-wide lecture by Mark Williams, a professor of palaeontology at the University of Le...

This guest editorial explores the intricate relationship between anthropology and the concept of impossible futures, focusing on the global push towards electric vehicles (EVs) and the lithium energy assemblage. Drawing inspiration from a lecture by palaeobiologist Mark Williams, a member of the Anthropocene Working Group (AWG), the author reflects...

Invited editorial for the Journal of Legal Anthropology

(Version of article recently accepted for publication in Anthropological Quarterly.) Abstract: The salares, or salt flats, of Bolivia are the site of the world's largest proven reserves of lithium. Although different proposals were initiated over the decades, it was during the thirteen years (2006-2019) under the Movement to Socialism (MAS) gove...

Afterword to the volume Cultural Expertise, Law, and Rights: A Comprehensive Guide, edited by Livia Holden (May 2023)

(Invited guest editorial under revision for Anthropology Today.) An anthropology recalibrated for the Anthropocene must find ways of navigating the socio-material interdependencies through which climate crisis is lived, yet within and across scales that resist conceptual reduction—to the global, to the local, to the political economic, to the rhizo...

Chapter for international conference (University of Lausanne, June 6 - 10, 2022) and edited volume entitled "After Law: Mobilization, Injustice, and Confrontation in the Post-Juristocratic Transition" (M. Goodale and Olaf Zenker, eds.)

Forthcoming in Law & Social Inquiry (2023) special issue entitled "Measures of Justice: A Symposium in Honor of Sally Engle Merry," edited by Peter Dixon, Pamina Firchow, and Fiorella Vera-Adrianzen

FORTHCOMING IN THE JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL ANTHROPOLOGICAL INSTITUTE 28.3 (2022). This article uses reflections on chronopolitical praxis during the period 2006-2019 in Bolivia in order to make a more general contribution to the anthropology of time and temporalities. The article develops the theoretical concept of "timerendering" in order to examin...

Reinventing Human Rights offers a bold argument: that only a radically reformulated approach to human rights will prove adequate to confront and overcome the most consequential global problems. Charting a new path—away from either common critiques of the various incapacities of the international human rights system or advocacy for the status quo—Ma...

Chinese translation of “Sally Engle Merry: Shaping the Anthropology of Law," to appear in the journal Jurisprudence: Legal Philosophy, Legal Methodology, and Artificial Intelligence (Beijing)

(Forthcoming in Inference, Vol. 7, No. 1, 2022) I remember very well the moment when I suddenly came under the influence of what the Polish-British anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski cryptically described as the "ethnographer's magic." Having finished my undergraduate training as a so-called Sovietologist in the year in which the Soviet Union its...

This pioneering volume explores the long-neglected history of social rights, from the Middle Ages to the present. It debunks the myth that social rights are 'second-generation rights' – rights that appeared after World War II as additions to a rights corpus stretching back to the Enlightenment. Not only do social rights stretch back that far; they...

This book is a groundbreaking collection of essays that provides an original and internationally framed conception of the historical, theoretical, and ethnographic interconnections of law and anthropology. Each of the chapters in the Handbook provides a survey of the current state of scholarly debate and an argument about the future direction of re...

Afterword to "Dark Ethnography? Encountering the 'Uncomfortable' Other in Anthropological Research," special issue of Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, edited by Lene Faust and Simone Pfeifer, Vol. 146, No. 2.

El artículo utiliza una investigación etnográfica sobre movimientos antigubernamentales de derecha en Bolivia, realizada en el punto álgido del conflicto de 2008 y 2009, para reflexionar sobre la relación entre investigación antropológica, compromiso ético y política del conocimiento. Describe los contextos epistemológicos y políticos en los que su...

To appear in Public Anthropologist, Volume 3 (December 2021)

Sally Engle Merry, a towering anthropologist of law, colonialism, gender, human rights, and justice, died on September 8, 2020, in Wellesley, Massachusetts. At the time of her death, she was serving as the Julius Silver Professor of Anthropology and a codirector of the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at New York University.

Afterword to "Dark Ethnography? Encountering the 'Uncomfortable' Other in Anthropological Research," special issue of Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, edited by Lene Faust and Simone Pfeifer, Vol. 146, No. 2.

(PUBLISHED IN AMERICAN JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL LAW UNBOUND) This essay examines the ways in which anthropologists have tracked the rise and fall of international law after the end of the ColdWar. It argues that anthropological research has made important contributions to the wider understanding of international law as a mechanism for social and p...

Forthcoming in the American Journal of International Law Unbound (August 2021)

Rather than a traditional "in memoriam" or obituary, the article provides a more substantive discussion of the ways in which Merry's professional life and research career shaped the field in ways that will be felt for many years to come. These contributions can be divided into three categories: institutional, intellectual, and methodological. In de...

Anthropological research played an important role in tracing the ethnographic contours of the rise and transformation of rights in the post-Cold War period. This chapter surveys some of the most important currents in the anthropology of rights as an enduring context for the wider field of anthropology and law. First, the chapter examines key develo...

Chapter in Festschrift volume in honor of Sally Engle Merry, edited by Philip Alston.

Introduction to special issue on "Law in Vernacular Spaces" in Droit et Société, No. 106 (December 2020)

Afterword to Julie Fraser and Brianne McGonigle (eds.) Intersections of Law and Culture at the International Criminal Court (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2020).

With the publication of Man or Monster? The Trial of a Khmer Rouge Torturer in 2016 and The Justice Facade: Trials of Transition in Cambodia in 2018, Hinton completed an unprecedented trilogy that began with Why Did They Kill? Cambodia in the Shadow of Genocide in 2004. These three works represent a sustained effort to understand and explain genoci...

in preparation for Journal of Legal Pluralism, Vol. 53, No. 1.

This column reflects on the continuing relevance of human rights in the 75th anniversary year of the founding of the United Nations. Despite the background circumstances, which included the catastrophe of a recent world war, ongoing colonial violence, and the dawn of the nuclear age, the new international body adopted the language and ideology of h...

Chapter 2 from Danielle Celermajer and Alexandre Lefebvre (eds.) The Subject of Human Rights, Stanford University Press (Stanford Studies in Human Rights).

Carol Kidron’s longitudinal and critical ethnography of communal genocide commemoration in Cambodia reveals the troubling outer limits of human rights and humanitarian vernacularization, cultural and conceptual border regions where cosmopolitan liberalism loses its way, is menaced on all sides, and ultimately succumbs to its own inherent weaknesses...

Forthcoming invited article in the Netherlands Quarterly of Human Rights (Vol. 38, No.3, September 2020) that reflects on human rights and the 75th anniversary of the founding of the UN in light of the global Covid-19 pandemic.

The article uses ethnographic research on right-wing anti-government movements in Bolivia conducted at the height of social conflict and cultural violence in 2008 and 2009 to reflect more generally on the relationship between anthropological research, ethical commitment, and the politics of knowledge. The article first describes the relevant episte...

Response to Katharine Young's review of Samuel Moyn's Not Enough (2018), forthcoming in Inference Vol. 5, No. 2 (March 2020).

Afterword to Julie Fraser and Brianne McGonigle (eds.) Intersections of Law and Culture at the International Criminal Court (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2020).

Forthcoming contribution to symposium in Opinio Juris.

Forthcoming in Inference, Vol. 5, No. 3 (2020)

First op-ed on the current crisis in Bolivia.

Introduction to A Revolution Fragments made available by Duke University Press.

In light of current developments in Bolivia, I'm posting my chapter on the opposition and right-wing, a chapter that provides a long-term study of sectors that are currently mobilizing.

Bolivia - Domesticating Democracy: The Politics of Conflict Resolution in Bolivia. By Susan Helen Ellison. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018. Pp. 281. $99.95 cloth; $25.95 paper. - Volume 76 Issue 4 - Mark Goodale

Research seminar at ANU College of Law as Distinguished Visiting Mentor

This chapter examines the status of socioeconomic rights (SER) by considering how SER were understood within wider debates over competing visions for the postwar order during a critical period of postconflict transition. What I will argue is that SER must be located on one side of an important normative divide: that which separates rights-based app...

摘要： 摘要： 劳拉 ·纳德的最新著作《法律生命：人类学 纳德的最新著作《法律生命：人类学 纳德的最新著作《法律生命：人类学 纳德的最新著作《法律生命：人类学 课题 》（ 2002 年）的出 年）的出 版，是一个时代的记录。 版，是一个时代的记录。 她主张而且也身体力行地去推动法律人类学的发展，因为她坚信，人类学及其最具特点的方法论——民族志——必然会在法律的研究过程中开辟一条新的道路。纳德试图将这两种方法结合起来——批判跨国主义与政治经济学——可以部分地揭示出开放性话语、民主化以及自由主义合法性的表达方式，进而促成全球化的合作。法律人类学研究应该以研究法律和社会问题为己任，不仅只是理论-实践结合的简单演绎，而且在现实生活中，对于追求社会正义与平等，反对资本主义霸权统治，都要做出应有的贡献。

I remember quite well the week the census takers came to town. The year was 1999 and I was living in a provincial capital in the north of Bolivia’s Potosí Department. They were not coming to actually count people and things, because the next formal census would not take place for another 2 years. But the Instituto Nacional de Estadística (INE) had...

1947年和1948年，联合国教科文组织对各种知识分子，政治领袖，神学家，社会活动家和其他人进行了全球调查，以收集他们对人权哲学基础的看法。这项调查当时并不广为人知，但今天仍然令人惊讶。

En 1947 y 1948, la UNESCO realiza una encuesta mundial entre un grupo heterogéneo de intelectuales, dirigentes políticos, teólogos, activistas sociales y otras personalidades, a fin de recoger sus opiniones sobre los fundamentos filosóficos de los derechos humanos. Una encuesta desconocida por el público en general que hoy resulta de sorprendente a...

В 1947-48 годах ЮНЕСКО обратилась к представителям интеллигенции, политическим и общественным деятелям, теологам и другим выдающимся фигурам того времени с просьбой поделиться своими взглядами на философские принципы, которые должны лечь в основу прав человека. Результаты этого опроса не получили широкой огласки, однако за прошедшие с тех пор 70 ле...

أجرت اليونسكو خلال سنتي 1947 و 1948 تحقيقا على الصعيد العالمي لجمع آراء مجموعة متنوّعة متكونة من مثقفين، وقادة سياسيين، وعلماء الدين، ونشطاء اجتماعيين وغيرهم من الشخصيات، حول الأسس الفلسفية لحقوق الإنسان. وقد اتضح اليوم بشكل غير متوقع أن المواضيع التي تضمنها هذا التحقيق الذي بقي مجهولا لدى العموم، لا زالت تتلاءم مع الواقع الحالي.

Travel and transformation—these are the two problems in human rights that animate this lively, empirically rich, and consequential interdisciplinary volume. How, when, and why do human rights norms circulate among the quite diverse types of networks that have come to constitute what can only loosely be described as the human rights system? And when...

Em 1947 e 1948, a UNESCO conduziu uma pesquisa mundial junto a um grupo diversificado de intelectuais, líderes políticos, teólogos, ativistas sociais e outras personalidades para reunir suas opiniões sobre as fundamentações filosóficas dos direitos humanos. Uma pesquisa que não foi amplamente divulgada na época, mas que é surpreendentemente relevan...

Chapter in The Oxford Handbook of Law and Anthropology (forthcoming 2019)

This article considers the ways in which the social sciences can and should be a critical friend to the field of human rights. After surveying a selected number of recent interventions that depict the current status of human rights in quite different, even opposing, ways, the article concludes on a guardedly optimistic note: that well-meaning criti...

En 1947 et 1948, l’UNESCO mène une enquête mondiale auprès d'un groupe hétérogène d'intellectuels, de dirigeants politiques, de théologiens, d'activistes sociaux et d'autres personnalités, afin de recueillir leurs opinions sur les fondements philosophiques des droits de l’homme. Une enquête méconnue du grand public qui s’avère aujourd’hui d’une éto...

In 1947 and 1948, UNESCO conducted a worldwide survey of a diverse group of intellectuals, political leaders, theologians, social activists and other personalities to gather their opinions on the philosophical foundations of human rights. A survey that was not widely publicized at the time, but one that is surprisingly relevant today.

(** Co-winner of the 2017 International Geneva Award.) This article reexamines one of the most enduring questions in the comparative intellectual, legal, and ethical history of human rights: the question of human rights universality. By the end of the first decade of the post-Cold War, debates around the legitimacy and origins of human rights took...

Essay forthcoming in Irish Studies in International Affairs, the journal of the Royal Irish Academy.

The article uses ethnographic research on rightwing anti-government movements in Bolivia conducted at the height of social conflict and cultural violence around the adoption of the new constitution to reflect more generally on both the limitations and possibilities of political and legal anthropology in a post-socialist and post-cosmopolitan age. A...

Review article published in Boston Review. The article can also be accessed online at: http://bostonreview.net/global-justice/mark-goodale-what-are-human-rights-good

Table of Contents for forthcoming edited volume

The Bolivia Reader provides a panoramic view, from antiquity to the present, of the history, culture, and politics of a country known for its ethnic and regional diversity, its rich natural resources and dilemmas of economic development, and its political conflict and creativity. Featuring both classic and little-known texts ranging from fiction, m...

http://stanfordpress.typepad.com/blog/2018/05/contested-foundations-2.html#more

Since its adoption in 1948, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) has served as the foundation for the protection of human rights around the world. Historians and human rights scholars have claimed that the UDHR was influenced by UNESCO's 1947-48 global survey of intellectuals, theologians, and cultural and political leaders, a survey th...

This chapter draws from the contemporary anthropology of human rights to reflect more generally about human rights as a normative system that organizes forms of social belonging in particular ways. It argues that as the project of human rights developed, especially after the end of the Cold War, it evolved into a set of propositions that rested on...

Allez Savoir, January 2015

Speech given to the Danish Anthropological Association and the Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen on May 7, 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yFykkBv7KE&feature=youtu.be

Note that date of publication is 2010. This chapter examines Lolle Nauta’s notion of a productive dialectics between self/other and, more generally, sameness/difference in terms of contemporary debates over the meaning and implications of transnational normativities such as “human rights” and “justice.” The contribution is both theoretical and emp...

This chapter explores some of the ways in which the recent anthropology of human rights contributes to both the anthropology of morality and the broader understanding of morality itself. Anthropologists have found the ethnography of human rights practices to be a fertile source of new ideas about the relationships between normativity, agency, and s...

Note that date for publication is 2009.

Keynote speech given at the inauguration of the new building for the Department of Law and Anthropology.

The anthropology of law is a key subfield within anthropology. Over the past twenty-five years, anthropologists have studied and analyzed the ways in which new forms of law – such as human rights – have reshaped important questions of citizenship, indigenous movements, and, biotechnology, among many others. Meanwhile, the rise of international law...

Forthcoming

Presentation given to the Minerva Center for Human Rights, Faculty of Law, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Masterclass and doctoral workshop on in program entitled “Human Rights Under Pressure: Ethics, Law, and Politics,” jointly organized by the Minerva Center for Human Rights at The Hebrew University and the Freie Universität Berlin

Presentation given at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

This article uses empirical data from the anthropology of human rights and the ethics of everyday life to examine the relationship between dominant value frames, moral action, and the rise of 'counter-humanities' in the form of cultural identitarianism, racial and class-based nationalism, 10 apocalyptic theologies, and nativist populism. This artic...

This article shines a critical light on a trend in anthropology that has both mirrored, and, not inconsequentially, shaped, a broader preoccupation with rights-making and rights claiming as the foundational strategies behind what Karen Engle called the ‘‘elusive promise of indigenous development.’’ The article uses recent ethnographies of legal imp...

Presentation to Department of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies, University of Zurich

Presentation to the Centre d’histoire internationale et d’études politiques de la mondialisation, University of Lausanne