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Toward a Critical Anthropology of Human Rights

June 2006
Current Anthropology 47(3):485-511

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University of Oxford

Some 17 years after the end of the cold war, the international and transnational human rights regimes that emerged in the wake of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights are at a crossroads. On the one hand, the political openings created by the end of the bipolar postwar world have allowed what Eleanor Roosevelt described as the curious grapevine of nongovernmental actors to carry ideas and practices associated with universal human rights into different parts of the world as part of broader transnational development activities. On the other hand, this spread of human rights discourse has only magnified the different problems at the heart of human rights, problems that are theoretical, practical, and phenomenological. Anthropology has an important part to play in addressing these problems and in suggesting ways in which human rights can be reframed so that their original purposes, those embodied in documents like the UDHR, stand a better chance of being realized.

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Current Anthropology Volume 47, Number 3, June 2006 485

Toward a Critical Anthropology of Human

Rights

by Mark Goodale

Some 17 years after the end of the cold war, the international and transnational human rights regimes

that emerged in the wake of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights are at a crossroads.

On the one hand, the political openings created by the end of the bipolar postwar world have allowed

what Eleanor Roosevelt described as the “curious grapevine” of nongovernmental actors to carry

ideas and practices associated with universal human rights into different parts of the world as part

of broader transnational development activities. On the other hand, this spread of human rights

discourse has only magniﬁed the different problems at the heart of human rights, problems that are

theoretical, practical, and phenomenological. Anthropology has an important part to play in ad-

dressing these problems and in suggesting ways in which human rights can be reframed so that their

original purposes, those embodied in documents like the UDHR, stand a better chance of being

realized.

This article is both an exercise in historiography, a reanalysis

of the ways in which American anthropology’s relationship

to human rights has been represented, and an argument for

a different anthropological orientation to human rights. It

uses the intellectual history of American anthropology to il-

lustrate one way in which human rights has been understood

within the broader discipline. The effects of the process of

engagement-disengagement-reengagement that characterizes

American anthropology’s ambivalent history with human

rights can be seen in the relative anthropological silence in

broader human rights debates for almost 40 years. The an-

thropological voice was absent during the rise of the inter-

national and (eventually) transnational human rightsregimes,

and the case of American anthropology both symbolizes and

reﬂects this intellectual absence. As the argument for a critical

anthropology of human rights proper is developed, the in-

tellectual history of anthropology’s engagement with human

rights becomes more diverse, such that American anthro-

pology can no longer stand in for the broader discipline, even

for heuristic purposes.

Histories

American anthropology and its practitioners have had a long,

strange relationship with international human rights theory

Mark Goodale is Assistant Professor of Conﬂict Analysis and An-

thropology at George Mason University (Fairfax, VA 22030-4444,

U.S.A. [mgoodale@gmu.edu]). The present paper was submitted 23

IX 04 and accepted 24 VIII 05.

and practice. Although it must be hard for anthropologists

of the most recent generation to imagine, there was a time

when the discipline, through its representatives, was consid-

ered a source of authoritative and scientiﬁc opinion weighty

enough that it was asked to issue public statements on matters

of great moment. It was natural, then, that the United

Nations—through the United Nations Educational, Scientiﬁc

and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)—would ask a well-

known member of the American Anthropological Association

(AAA) to submit a statement to assist the UN Commission

on Human Rights, which was in 1947 working on a draft

version of what would eventually become the 1948 Universal

Declaration of Human Rights.

By the mid-twentieth century,

all three major Western sociocultural anthropological trajec-

tories (“schools” is certainly too strong)—American cultural

anthropology, British social anthropology, and French social

anthropology—had ﬁrmly established themselves, taken to-

gether, as the undisputed scientiﬁc database of cross-social

and cross-cultural research ﬁndings, including cultural uni-

versals. Thus, apart from the obviously political and philo-

sophical dimensions of the declaration both as a statement

of intent by the international community that genocide would

never again be tolerated and as an international ratiﬁcation

of the values of liberalism, its proponents were understandably

conﬁdent that professional anthropologists would endorse

and then publicly substantiate the declaration’s central em-

pirical conclusions: that human beings are naturally endowed

1. For an account of the drafting of the declaration, see Morsink

(1999); see also Roosevelt (1948).

486 Current Anthropology Volume 47, Number 3, June 2006

with certain rights and that these rights are, in fact, universal,

coextensive with humanness irrespective of the subjectivities

embedded in history and culture.

But this conﬁdence would turn out to have been misplaced.

After a period of some uncertainty, the executive board of

the AAA, under the guiding inﬂuence of Melville Herskovits,

authorized the publication of a “Statement on Human Rights”

in late 1947 and its submission to the UN Commission on

Human Rights.

The statement rejected the validity of a uni-

2. Despite the antiuniversalist tendency that characterized American

anthropology up through the 1930s, by mid-century a new emphasis had

emerged that sought to refocus research on more generalizable or sci-

entiﬁc purposes. The problem of cultural universals, which the early

Boasians had rejected as crypto-evolutionist, was invested with greater

importance. This tendency culminated in the Human Relations Area Files

and the eventual rise of the neo-evolutionist schools of cultural ecology

and materialism. In Europe this period (1945–55) overlapped with the

growing inﬂuence of the superuniversalism of French structural anthro-

pology (Le´vi-Strauss 1949) and the continuing emphasis in British social

anthropology on pursuing a “science of mankind,” that is, applying sci-

entiﬁc epistemologies to the study of human societies.

3. The full text of the statement was printed in the American An-

thropologist (AAA 1947). There is still some mystery surrounding the

exact sequence of events of 1946 and 1947 that culminated in the AAA

statement. Following the lead of the late Wilcomb Washburn, who pub-

lished the results of some of his research in 1987, I am conducting research

in the AAA archives, which are housed within the National Anthropo-

logical Archives at the Smithsonian Institution’s museum support center

in Suitland, Maryland. Although this work is ongoing and is being used

for a book-length manuscript, there have already been some important

ﬁndings. I have studied most of the presidential and executive board

correspondence and the minutes of the executive board meetings for

1946, 1947, and 1948. I have not found any ofﬁcial correspondence

between the president or the executive board and either UNESCO or the

UN Commission for Human Rights or any correspondence by other

parties that refers to an ofﬁcial request by the UN to the AAA to draft

a statement on human rights. What can be documented, however, is the

following: (1) In 1945 Melville Herskovits was named chairman of the

Committee on International Cooperation in Anthropology of the Na-

tional Research Council, a committee made up of AAA members that

acted as the association’s de facto committee for international outreach

and engagement, particularly with international institutions like the UN.

(2) On June 12, 1947, Herskovits sent a draft copy of the statement,

written by him without any collaboration, to the president of the AAA

(Clyde Kluckhohn) with a note reading, “Here is the draft of the statement

I sent to the UNESCO Committee, revised in accordance with the idea

that it would be forwarded to the Commission on Human Rights of the

United Nations, from the Association.” (3) In the late summer and early

fall of 1947 Kluckhohn corresponded regularly with J. Alden Mason, the

editor of the American Anthropologist, in order to ensure that the ﬁnal

statement, which had been only slightly and nonsubstantively revised (by

Herskovits himself), would be published as soon as possible. (4) In Oc-

tober 1947 Ralph Beals and Kluckhohn took steps to stop the production

of Volume 49, Number 4, because Mason had mistakenly placed the

statement in the journal’s “Brief Communications” section, whereas the

executive board wanted it to appear as the number’s lead article (which

it eventually did). (5) The statement was published at the end of 1947

without, as far as I could discover, a formal resolution (or ratiﬁcation)

from the AAA executive board at its 1947 meetings. Thus it appears that

UNESCO approached the National Research Council and not the AAA

for the “ofﬁcial” American anthropological view on human rights, even

though Herskovits’s NRC committee eventually acted for and through

versal declaration of human rights on both empirical and

ethical grounds. The executive board observed that anthro-

pologists had amply documented a richness of diversity in

moral systems and that the cross-cultural data did not support

the assertion of a universal set of substantive rights. Thus it

agreed that anthropology could provide objective information

about the existence or not of universal normative values such

as those asserted in the declaration but simply came to the

opposite conclusion from the one necessary to legitimate the

UN Commission’s project.

But, as important, it opposed a

universal declaration of human rights because of its imperi-

alistic irony. No matter how well-intentioned the Commis-

sion’s effort, the end result of any internationally sanctioned

statement of rights would be the imposition of hegemonic

moral values on less powerful groups of people whose patterns

of behavior were misunderstood and reviled by Western elites.

In other words, a charter that was intended to protect the

powerless from the outrages of fascism and totalitarianism in

their various forms would have the unintended consequence

of compelling individuals and cultures outside the majestic

arc of Western liberalism to bring social practices into line

with what was hoped would be a set of legal rights backed

up by the mechanisms of international law.

Within less than a year of the statement’s publication in

the American Anthropologist, two critiques by prominent an-

thropologists appeared in the same journal (Barnett 1948;

Steward 1948), followed by one more short comment the

following year (Bennett 1949). Tellingly, neither Barnett nor

Steward actually discussed the main bases for the executive

board’s rejection of the legitimacy of what would become the

1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights—what I have

characterized as the empirical and the ethical critiques. Rather,

their critiques were concerned almost exclusively with what

I consider something of a red herring: the statement’s second

proposition and related elaborations, in which it is asserted

that “respect for differences between cultures is validated by

the scientiﬁc fact that no technique of qualitatively evaluating

cultures has been discovered” (AAA 1947, 542). In other

words, (1) anthropologists are scientists, and scientists are

the AAA. It is to this extent only that it is correct to say that the UN

“asked” the AAA to comment on a declaration of human rights.

4. As the statement says in its signiﬁcant third proposition:“Standards

and values are relative to the culture from which they derive so that any

attempt to formulate postulates that grow out of the beliefs or moral

codes or one culture must to that extent detract from the applicability

of any Declaration of Human Rights to mankind as a whole” (AAA 1947,

542).

5. The board’s fear that a universal declaration of human rights would

lead to a kind of moral imperialism was not simply prospective; it drew

upon historical precedents such as the fact that “so noble a document

as the American Declaration of Independence, or the American Bill of

Rights, could be written by men who were themselves slave-owners, in

a country where chattel slavery was a part of the recognized social order.

The revolutionary character of the slogan ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’

was never more apparent than in the struggles to implement it by ex-

tending it to the French slave-owning colonies” (AAA 1947, 542).

Goodale Toward a Critical Anthropology of Human Rights 487

epistemologically barred from validating moral propositions

such as those contained in the declaration; (2) therefore, an-

thropologists must remain forever agnostic as to the scientiﬁc

truth or falsity of claims regarding universal human rights;

and (3), given this, anthropologists cannot, as anthropologists,

endorse any intellectual or political position that assumes the

existence (or nonexistence) of a universal set of rights that is

coextensive with humanness. I consider this a red herring

because it does not go the merits of the issues that are sub-

stantively addressed elsewhere in the statement and, moreover,

transforms what was in fact the promising beginning of a

concrete (and critical) anthropological engagement with hu-

man rights into yet another intradisciplinary debate—andnot

a very important or lasting one—over epistemology.

After 1949, the phrase “human rights” did not appear in

the title of any article published in the AAA’s ﬂagship peer-

reviewed journal until 1987, when Wilcomb Washburn of the

Smithsonian published a very brief comment on cultural rel-

ativism in which he described, also very brieﬂy, some of the

deliberations of the AAA executive board as it drafted and

revised the 1947 statement. The absence of “human rights”

from the title of any full article published in American An-

thropologist until 1988,

while not evidence per se, is at least

symbolic of the fact that American anthropology had spent

the preceding 40 years in exile from the most important de-

bates over human rights theory and practice.

Despite what my research into this period has indicated,

however, there are notable counterpositions in the histori-

ography of American anthropology’s engagement with and

disengagement from human rights. In 2001 Karen Engle, a

law professor, published an account of the relationship be-

tween human rights and the AAA, a relationship that she

characterized as moving from “skepticism to embrace.” Al-

though her analysis of recent developments is useful, there

are several difﬁculties with her argument. First, the history

of this relationship simply does not support her assertion that

anthropologists “have been embarrassed ever since” the pub-

lication of the 1947 statement (2001, 536). As I have shown,

there was virtually no formal response by members of the

AAA either in support of or in opposition to the statement

after 1947, hardly what one would expect if there had been

a general outcry of indignant embarrassment over a document

that misrepresented the general will of the association’s mem-

bers on this issue. Second, as have several others who have

described this history, Engle makes the mistake of eliding the

years between 1947 and the 1980s and then representing them

in terms of the past 15 years. Thus, for example, she writes

that “for the past ﬁfty years, the Statement has caused the

AAA great shame. Indeed, the term ‘embarrassment’ is con-

tinually used in reference to the Statement” (p. 541). She does

6. And it was a political scientist, Alison Dundes Renteln, who pub-

lished the ﬁrst article in the American Anthropologist after the 1940s to

engage directly with human rights, although in this case only in order

to explore the meanings of cultural relativism (Renteln 1988).

not reinforce this claim with any citations that reﬂect this

“continual reference,” even if this way of describing the 1947

statement would become commonplace during the 1990s. In

a sense, Engle commits a logical fallacy—post hoc, ergo propter

hoc—in making this argument: that the sea change during

the 1990s among some anthropologists was caused by a

buildup of simmering “embarrassment” during the preceding

40 years. And ﬁnally, Engle does not mention that the AAA

of 1999 was a profoundly different association from the AAA

of 1947; in other words, she (mis-)interprets this history by

holding the nature of the AAA (its size, stated mission, com-

position of membership, etc.) constant, much as legal scholars

hold the institutional nature of the U.S. Supreme Court con-

stant in order to track changes in its jurisprudence.

During the period from 1947 to the mid-1980s, the Uni-

versal Declaration on Human Rights served as the foundation

for the creation of an entire framework of international and

transnational human rights discourse, within which the most

important human rights instruments,

nongovernmental or-

ganizations,

and international publications

were established,

developed, and grew in power and inﬂuence. While the with-

drawal of American anthropology and anthropologists from

human rights debates and practice did not exactly create a

vacuum, the development and increasing hegemony ofhuman

rights were facilitated by the ongoing participation of aneclec-

tic mix of intellectuals and nonelites dominated by interna-

tional legal scholars, legal philosophers, political scientists,

diplomats, social activists, career bureaucrats and civil ser-

vants, politicians, and journalists. Although this article is not

the place for a full analysis of the impact of this discursive

history on current human rights theory and practice and its

implications for current anthropology, it is enough at this

7. In fact, recent archival research shows that the AAA in 1947 would

be nearly unrecognizable to AAA members today. For example,according

to AAA executive board minutes from 1946, even though there were 600

professional anthropologists in the United States at that time, the asso-

ciation had only 200 members, and of these a “majority” (apparently

more than 100) were nonanthropologists: “amateurs, students, [and] in-

terested persons from other ﬁelds, and libraries” (Minutes of AAA Ex-

ecutive Board, March 1946–May 1954, Box 192, National Anthropological

Archives). This means that the universe of professional anthropology was

dramatically smaller at mid-century, and within this world the AAA

played a much less signiﬁcant role than it would later. This would also

explain why it appears that the National Research Council, not the AAA,

was approached by UNESCO.

8. For example, the Declaration of the Rights of the Child (1959), the

Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and

Peoples (1961), the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and

Cultural Rights (1966), the International Covenant on Civil and Political

Rights (1966), the International Convention on the Elimination of All

Forms of Racial Discrimination (1966), and the Convention on the Elim-

ination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (1976).

9. For example, Amnesty International (1961), Helsinki Watch/Hu-

man Rights Watch (1978), and Peace Brigades International (1981). One

important exception is the founding of Cultural Survival by David and

Pia Maybury-Lewis in 1972.

10. For example, Human Rights Quarterly (1978).

488 Current Anthropology Volume 47, Number 3, June 2006

point to observe that current human rights discourse bears

the traces of its genealogy’s ﬁrst 40 years.

Beginning in the 1980s, however, the formal relationship

between American anthropology and human rights changed,

and the period from about 1987

to the present marks the

current and third distinct era in this uneasy engagement.

Apart from the resurrection of the earlier debates over uni-

versalism and cultural relativism, as a matter of practice the

discipline of anthropology underwent a much more profound

realignment in its orientation toward human rights. Partly on

the basis of the work of the earlier cultural-survival anthro-

pologists and those involved in the emerging indigenous-

rights movements, the AAA began to consider ways in which

it could employ anthropological knowledge to advocate for

indigenous peoples who were either direct targets or indirect

victims of state and multinational corporate abuses.

This

intent was signaled by the appointment by the AAA of a

special investigating commission in 1990, chaired by Terrence

Turner, to investigate the aggressive encroachments by the

Brazilian state on traditional Yanomami territory.

The cre-

ation of this commission and its subsequent report (1991),

which, according to the Committee for Human Rights (2001),

“appears to have played a role in stopping the appropriation

of all but small, isolated reserves in the Yanomami area and

precipitating Brazilian agreement to a very large, contiguous

Yanomami homeland,” led institutionally to theestablishment

by the AAA executive board in 1992 of a Commission for

Human Rights, which was directed “to develop a human

rights conceptual framework and identify relevant human

rights issues, to develop human rights education and net-

working, and to develop and implement mechanisms for or-

11. The mid- to late 1980s was the time when, partly stimulated by

the 1984 publication of Clifford Geertz’s 1983 AAA DistinguishedLecture

“Anti Anti-Relativism,” the discipline suddenly rediscovered the com-

plexities of some of the early issues surrounding anthropology andhuman

rights, speciﬁcally the problem of universalism and cultural relativism.

Other indications of this renewed intellectual interest are Washburn’s

1987 article and Ronald Cohen’s 1989 article in the American Anthro-

pologist, in which he argues for a “new approach” to human rights from

anthropology. Cohen’s characterization of the period between the crea-

tion of the Universal Declaration and the time of his article reinforces

my own. He asks, rhetorically, “What for instance has anthropological

research (not simply pious pronouncements) to say about the rights de-

scribed in the U.N. Charter, or the African Charter . . .?” (1989, 1015).

The answer, I have argued for this period, is not much.

12. Just to be clear, I see three distinct eras or phases in American

anthropology’s (dis-)engagement with human rights: (1) 1945–50: formal

and public consideration of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights,

rejection of it, denial of possibilities for engagement; (2) 1950–87: an-

thropological absence from important developments as an international

and transnational human rights discourse emerged and became pre-

eminent; and (3) 1987–present.

13. Perhaps coincidentally, much of the most important early cultural-

survival work involved indigenous groups in Amazonia (the Yanomami,

the Kayapo, the Xerente).

14. The following information is drawn from the ﬁve-year evaluation

report of the AAA’s Committee for Human Rights (2001).

ganizational action on issues affecting the AAA, its members,

and the discipline.”

During this time period (1992–94), one of the founding

members of what would become the Committee for Human

Rights (the permanent standing committee created from the

Commission), Ellen Messer, published in the Annual Review

of Anthropology something of a manifesto for this latest phase

in anthropology’s engagement with human rights (Messer

1993). In it she made the somewhat curious argument that

even though anthropologists had been largely absent from

most of the political and intellectual development of human

rights, this absence had actually “contributed to the expansion

of the human rights concept” (1993, 222). In other words,

even though, as she admitted, a search of “computerized da-

tabases and major human rights journals such as Human

Rights Quarterly . . . uncover[s] few articles by anthropolo-

gists” (pp. 223–24), the “editors and authors of some collec-

tions on human rights in cross-cultural perspective that ap-

peared over the past decade . . . are predominantly political

theorists, legal scholars, and philosophers” (p. 224), and

“these nonanthropological disciplines also appear to dominate

the ongoing UN process of deﬁning, advocating, and advo-

cating human rights” (p. 224), anthropology’s marginalization

from the core of human rights theorizing and practice had

allowed it during the 1980s to research and advocate for what

were either ignored issues within long-standing human rights

doctrine (e.g., linguistic or ethnic rights) or issues that had

not yet been accepted as human rights issues per se (e.g.,

cultural rights or rights of indigenous peoples).

What made Messer’s article historically signiﬁcant was ex-

actly what transformed it into a call to action. In attempting

to “counter” the “conventional wisdom” that anthropological

knowledge and praxis had been insigniﬁcant in the devel-

opment of human rights, she compressed the history of this

relationship so that what I have called the second period

(1950–87) was subtly elided, with the result that the events

immediately prior to and including what I have described as

the third and current phase (1987–present) came to represent

the history of the relationship between anthropology and hu-

man rights itself. In doing this, Messer was both right and

wrong. She was wrong to the extent that she created the

impression that anthropological research or theorizing had

had any noticeable impact on the development of interna-

tional human rights theory and practice between 1950 and

the early to mid-1980s; she was absolutely right that anthro-

pology had had the impact she described—participation in

the development of new categories of collective rights and the

15. In the introduction to a 1997 special issue of the Journal of An-

thropological Research, guest editors Carole Nagengast and Terrence

Turner acknowledge the important role played by Patrick Morris in the

creation of the permanent Committee for Human Rights.

Goodale Toward a Critical Anthropology of Human Rights 489

pursuit of new epistemologies that fused anthropological

knowledge with human rights activism.

The programmatic nature of Messer’s article received rat-

iﬁcation by the AAA itself in 1999, when a new “Declaration

on Anthropology and Human Rights” was formally adopted

by the general AAA membership. This declaration was the

culmination of a process that began in the mid-1980s and,

in the event, marked the deﬁnitive repudiation of the 1947

statement.

The declaration is a relatively short and ambi-

guously worded document, but its central point is that the

AAA now afﬁrms that the weight of anthropological knowl-

edge demonstrates that “people and groups have a generic

right to realize their capacity for culture” (Committee for

Human Rights 1999). Far from rejecting the validity of in-

ternational human rights instruments such as the Universal

Declaration of Human Rights, the AAA’s declaration em-

phatically subsumes the putative human right to realize a

capacity for culture within a set of as-yet-to-be-articulated

human rights that go beyond those currently recognized in

international law. As the declaration states, this new position

“reﬂects a commitment to human rights consistent with in-

ternational principles but not limited by them.” I will discuss

the declaration’s allusion to the capabilities “solution” to the

rights “problem” in greater detail below, but it is enough here

to reiterate that practical and ethical commitments on the

part of a group of anthropologists led not only to a reversal

by the AAA of its earlier position on human rights but to

something much more: the emergence of the AAA as a major

human rights advocacy NGO in certain world regions focused

on leading-edge issues in human rights practice.

Finally, in 2000 the Committee for Human Rights aug-

mented its original set of guidelines and objectives, and this

list remains the current (as of 2005) set of operating principles

for the committee: (1) promote and protect human rights;

(2) expand the deﬁnition of human rights within an anthro-

pological perspective; (3) work internally with the member-

ship of the AAA to educate anthropologists and to mobilize

their support for human rights; (4) work externally with for-

eign colleagues, the people and groups with whom anthro-

pologists work, and other human rights organizations to de-

velop an anthropological perspective on human rights and

consult with them on human rights violations and the ap-

propriate actions to be taken; (5) inﬂuence and educate the

media, policy makers, NGOs, and decision makers in the

16. Messer went on to serve as an original member of the AAA’s

Committee for Human Rights between 1995 and 1998 at the same time

as continuing to play an important international role in efforts to have

a distinct human right to food recognized and institutionalized, most

recently through her directorship of the World Hunger Program at Brown

University.

17. In this regard it is interesting that no mention is made of the 1947

statement at any place on the committee’s web site, the section entitled

“Documents of Historical Value” being limited to the small number of

historically important documents produced by the committee itself since

1995.

private sector; and (6) encourage research on all aspects of

human rights from the conceptual to the applied (Committee

for Human Rights 2001).

If we divide what I have called the third phase (1987–pre-

sent) into two subperiods, 1987–93 (from the late 1980s to

Messer’s review article) and 1994–present, it is clear that Mes-

ser’s argument for the discipline’s inﬂuence on human rights,

which was, even in 1993, still incipient, has been strengthened

over the past 15 years, partly through the direct involvement

of the Committee for Human Rights

but also through the

collective work of a small but growing group of anthropol-

ogists who have begun to study human rights as cultural

practice. Nevertheless, with respect to the development of

human rights theory—the expansion and deepening of what

Michael Perry (1998) calls the “idea of human rights”—an-

thropology’s contributions remain marginal at best. In other

words, despite the fact that the 1992 AAA Commission of

Human Rights was directed “to develop a human rights con-

ceptual framework and identify human rights issues” and the

commission’s successor is under an ongoing mandate to “ex-

pand the deﬁnition of human rights within an anthropological

perspective,” even a generous evaluation of the vigorous con-

ceptual and analytical debates over the content and meaning

of human rights reveals that the AAA’s goals for these areas

remain as yet unrealized.

As with the use of American anthropology to symbolize

the anthropological engagement with human rights more gen-

erally, this is a debatable point, but a consideration of a cross

section of major works in human rights theory during the

past decade shows how little the deﬁnition of human rights

has been expanded “within an anthropological perspective.”

A list of these works would include the various writings from

the “capabilities” perspective (e.g., Nussbaum 2000 [law/phi-

losophy]; Sen 2000 [development or welfare economics]; Ig-

natieff 2003 [history/journalism]; Perry 1998 [legal philoso-

phy]; and Shute and Hurley 1993 [law and philosophy]). Even

more revealing, anthropologists have been absent from many

of the major works in “culture and human rights” or “human

rights in cross-cultural perspective,” including Bell, Nathan,

and Peleg (2001 [no anthropologists among 14 contributors])

and An-Na’im (1992 [2 anthropologists among 15 contrib-

18. It is, of course, difﬁcult to measure degrees of “inﬂuence” in this

sense with any degree of certainty, but if one simply restricts the unit of

analysis to the actions of the AAA through the Committee for Human

Rights one can point to several cases in which anthropologists and the

AAA were partly responsible for either inﬂuencing human rights practice

by states or major institutions or took the lead in bringing what were

considered violations of international human rights law to the attention

of the global media. The most prominent example of this is the case of

the Yanomami, in which the active intervention of the special commission

mentioned earlier played a major role in forcing a change in policy by

the Brazilian government favorable to the Yanomami nation. At the same

time, when the alleged human rights violators are not nation-states or

multinational corporations but anthropologists themselves, the record of

the Committee for Human Rights and the AAA is more ambiguous, as

in the infamous Darkness in El Dorado affair (see Borofsky 2005).

490 Current Anthropology Volume 47, Number 3, June 2006

utors]).

Other anecdotal evidence of a relative anthropo-

logical silence in the development of human rights theory

includes the fact that only 2 of the 31 fellows of Harvard’s

Carr Center for Human Rights, a major human rights think

tank, have been anthropologists; the fellowships, predictably,

have overwhelmingly gone to lawyers, philosophers, histori-

ans, and political scientists. And ﬁnally, it can hardly be gain-

said that anthropology has contributed little to the much

broader and older debates about rights in general—human

rights being a category of the general with unique properties—

in moral philosophy and political theory. If Dworkin (1977)

urged us to take rights seriously, the same cannot be said of

anthropology as a source of moral or ethical theory, which

is, I would argue, ironic given that anthropology remains the

academic discipline best suited to understanding the human

experience in its fullest terms.

In light of the above, this article is necessarily a sally from

the theoretical margins of human rights debates. But in order

to develop what I understand to be a critical anthropology

of human rights, I will suggest several ways in which the

conceptual framework of human rights can be expanded so

as not merely to take account of but rather to rely on the

peculiar anthropological blend of cultural critique, ethnog-

raphy and other hybrid methodologies, and intersubjectivity.

In this sense, the arguments in this article are meant to

point to an anthropological “third way” in relationship to

human rights. Since at least Messer’s 1993 article, anthro-

pologists on both sides of the Atlantic (if not elsewhere) have

sought to clear new ground on which anthropological knowl-

edge could contribute to expanded articulations of human

rights. The ﬁrst move is perhaps best represented by Terrence

Turner’s argument (1997) that anthropologists have an ob-

ligation to use their knowledge of cultural difference and

richness to help form the foundation for an “emancipatory

cultural politics,” and his own inspired and pathbreaking writ-

ings and activities on behalf of the Kayapo are a clear ex-

pression of how an anthropologist can link anthropological

knowledge with a rights-based framework within which in-

digenous people can advance claims.

The second move was

to transform the social practice of human rights into an object

of anthropological inquiry. An important recent example of

this approach is Sally Merry’s (2005) book on the regulation

of violence against women through human rights, in which

she employs a transnational and mobile ethnography in order

to track the production and localization of human rights dis-

course in China, Fiji, Hong Kong, India, Switzerland, and the

United States. My call for a critical anthropology of human

19. This has began to change (see Cowan, Denbour, and Wilson 2001;

Goodale and Merry 2006; Wilson 1997; Wilson and Mitchell 2003).

20. See also Messer (1997), Nagengast (1997), and Zechenter (1997).

The special issue that contains all these articles began as a panel at the

1995 AAA annual meetings in which human rights were a topic of focused

interest. More recent work in the “emancipatory cultural politics” tra-

dition can be found in Nagengast and Ve´lez-Iba´n˜ez (2004), which re-

ceived a commendation from former president Jimmy Carter.

rights is intended to complement these efforts. Although I

argue for a type of anthropological engagement that is quite

distinct from both the cultural/political and the ethnographic/

descriptive and although the goals of the alternative orien-

tation I develop are also directed outside of anthropology

itself, my efforts here are part of a broader intellectual history,

one which makes a new formulation possible and (ideally)

credible.

To say this is also to ground the remaining sections in the

foregoing reinterpretation of this intellectual history. In other

words, any arguments I develop must be contextualized both

in relation to the particular history I describe above and in

relation to broader human rights currents outside of anthro-

pology toward which my argument for a critical anthropology

of human rights is ultimately directed. A recast historiography

of American anthropology’s relationship with human rights

is, therefore, both a necessary starting point and an episte-

mological resource for what follows.

Before moving to a discussion of my proposals for a critical

anthropology of human rights, however, it may be useful to

make explicit the way I have been employing “human rights”

throughout this article. By “human rights” I do not mean

exclusively a body of positive international law that forms the

“starting point for a process . . . intended to render certain

kinds of argument successful before judges in international

courts,” as one reader deﬁned “human rights” in a review of

an earlier draft of this article. This is an entirely reasonable

way of understanding “human rights,” one that limits the

usage to the narrow conﬁnes of positive law as informed by

an analysis of this law’s ability to demonstrate that (again in

this reader’s words) it has “acquired teeth.” This way of de-

ﬁning and studying human rights is best left to international

lawyers and others for whom the analysis of processes of

justicialability is within their competence. I use “human

rights” much more broadly: the phrase captures the constel-

lation of philosophical, practical, and phenomenological di-

mensions through which universal rights, rights believed to

be entailed by a common human nature, are enacted,debated,

practiced, violated, envisioned, and experienced. When I de-

scribe “human rights discourse” I am referring to the coteries

of concepts, practices, and experiences through which human

rights have meaning at different levels, levels which are prior

to and go beyond the merely instrumental or legal, important

as these levels are. My understanding of human rights is not

quite as broad as Upendra Baxi’s (“protean forms of social

action assembled, by convention, under a portal named ‘hu-

man rights”’ [2002, v]), but conceiving of human rights as

discourse does, obviously, broaden the referent beyond any

one of its most consequential parts (e.g., international human

rights law).

21. Conceptualizing human rights in these broader terms makes it

clear why the period 1948–89 is so important, as this was the period

when human rights discourse was developed and embedded conceptually

and institutionally. Indeed, the post-1989 emergence of international hu-

Goodale Toward a Critical Anthropology of Human Rights 491

Proposals

To begin with, what do I mean by a “critical” anthropology?

It is critical in two senses, the ﬁrst mundane but essential,

the second more complicated and not as self-evidently nec-

essary for reconﬁguring our understanding of human rights.

First, by calling it “critical” I do not mean simply to distin-

guish this application of anthropology from those that might

be seen as either dogmatic or naı¨ve, but there is an important

kernel of truth in this. In other words, I do not intend this

approach to signal the strategic adoption of what Andrew

Collier, in discussing the “critical realism” of Roy Bhaskar,

calls “a term of approval in philosophical contexts” (Collier

1994, xi), but a critical anthropology is indeed one that self-

consciously creates space between itself and ideas and prac-

tices that have become coextensive with or, in fact, constitute

the experience of everyday life. An anthropology that is critical

in this sense is especially salient in relation to human rights,

which has become, I would argue, the most (necessarily) ax-

iomatic of (neo-)liberalism’s global discourses. A critical an-

thropology represents a mode, a tone, an ongoing orientation

which is not intended to supplant other possibilities—an in-

tention that led to the hubristic errors made by some of the

pioneering anthropological reformers in the 1980s—but re-

served for ideas that have become ideology andsocialpractices

that have come to form part of the collective habitus.

But there is a second sense in which an anthropology can

be critical. This is a purposive criticality whose task is to effect

what Gunzelin Schmid Noerr (2002, 230), in his discussion

of Horkheimer and Adorno’s (2001[1944]) Dialectic of En-

lightenment, calls a “change in function”: the identiﬁcation,

contextualization, and, most important, practical employ-

ment of (in this case) normative principles in order to explain

their “failure to be realized in existing society.” For critical

theorists, of course, this is the criticality that tends toward an

enlightenment of the Enlightenment—the recovery of the

originally progressive nature of eighteenth-century reason,

which had regressed into self-destruction during the inter-

vening years—and is—apropos of human rights discourse—

the “fate which has always been reserved for triumphant

thought. If it voluntarily leaves behind its critical element to

become a mere means in the service of an existing order, it

involuntarily tends to transform the positive cause it has es-

poused into something negative and destructive” (Horkhei-

mer and Adorno 2001[1944], xv). A critical anthropology of

human rights, then, is one that seeks to uncover the latent

progressive potential underlying their core principles, which

have become repressed as human rights discourse has become

reiﬁed so that all that remains is an impenetrable granite

surface that blocks from view all of the “mediated conceptual

moments” that actually constitute human rights.

A critical anthropology of human rights is necessarily pro-

man rights as a legal strategy with teeth would not have been possible

had the discourse of human rights not already been ﬁrmly established.

gressive in that it assumes that (1) there is a set of potentially

emancipatory principles underlying human rights discourse

that (2) have become co-opted by institutional structures of

power so that human rights, ironically, tend toward what a

recent volume describes as “moral imperialism” (Herna´ ndez-

Truyol 2002) and that (3) formal reﬂection on this process

of co-optation and regression in some form is required before

the potentials embedded in human rights theory and practice

can be “realized in existing society.” And a critical anthro-

pology of human rights is progressive in another sense: its

purpose is to point to the possibility of a middle spacebetween

the reiﬁed normativity of a regressive human rights and the

chaos of contemporary human rights praxis, where, as with

the essence of the Enlightenment itself, according to Hork-

heimer and Adorno, there is now a false “choice between

alternatives, and the inescapability of this choice is that of

power” (2001[1944], 25).

In other words, a critical anthro-

pology of human rights can explain in context why the current

international and transnational human rights regimes have

failed to fulﬁll their promise and, if anything, have been

pushed into the spiral of regression described above.

Anthropologists of human rights working in this mode will

therefore use the various techniques available to them to

bracket human rights—to convert into the ﬁrst object of cri-

tique the processes by which the origins, development, and

transnationalizion of human rights discourse are eclipsed dur-

ing the discourse’s passage into hypernormativity. What I

propose here is not the use of anthropological methodologies

to facilitate the introduction (or consolidation) of human

rights discourse as it now exists (as Messer [1999], Nagengast

[1997], Turner [1997], Sponsel [1995], and others argue);

rather, a critical anthropology of human rights assumes that

reiﬁed, hypernormative human rights—human rights in their

current hegemonic, transnational forms—cannot serve as the

basis for realizing their aim, the creation of just communities

committed to the full realization of both individuals and col-

lectivities. To a certain extent, this application of a critical

anthropology to human rights parallels the “diatopical her-

meneutics” of Raimon Panikkar (1996[1982]) and Boaven-

tura de Sousa Santos (1995). As Panikkar argues, “critique

does not invalidate the Declaration of Human Rights, but

offers new perspectives for an internal criticism that setslimits

of validity for human rights, offering . . . possibilities for

enlarging [their] realm” (1996[1982], 92).

22. The alternatives in this case for both nation-states and smaller

collectivities being either the embrace and incorporation of international

human rights norms as such or a refusal.

23. According to Panikkar, “Diatopical hermeneutics stands for the

thematic consideration of understanding the other without assuming that

the other has the same basic self-understanding as I have. The ultimate

human horizon, and not only differing contexts, is at stake here” (1974,

4). This provides a way of envisioning how understanding could be

framed across or between different normativities, for example, between

human rights and other types of normative systems that might incor-

porate or otherwise adapt provisions of international human rights.

Christoph Eberhard is another scholar whose work on intercultural legal

492 Current Anthropology Volume 47, Number 3, June 2006

But the real contribution of a critical anthropology for

human rights theory and practice is that it proposes an al-

ternative to the false choices described above. The pursuit of

this middle space means that the alternative paradigm for

human rights I am suggesting can never be merely either

normative or descriptive but is based on what anthropologists

can say comparatively: that social actors across the range of

history and place seek to create meaning in their relations

with others, with greater or lesser degrees of success (de-

pending on an array of contingencies), by striving toward a

normative humanism.

“Normative humanism,” a central

ﬁnding of legal anthropological research in particular, con-

stitutes a central analytical framework for a critical anthro-

pology of human rights. Normative humanism is a way of

describing a basic cross-cultural fact of collective ordering:

that, given the right circumstances, people will organizethem-

selves so as to establish conditions for meaningful interactions

that are both patterned and prescriptive but that recognize

and formally incorporate a basic set of human-centered val-

ues, values that balance the whole breadth of local cultural

and social possibilities with common cognitive, physical, and

emotional imperatives. A reconstituted human rights, to be

effective and legitimate, would be dependent on the capacity—

freedom from constraint—of collectivities to organize them-

selves on these terms.

By “capacity of collectivities to organize themselves on these

terms” I mean something quite different from what is meant

by those who have developed the “capabilities” alternative

(or, perhaps, supplement) to international human rights,

most notably Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum. Nussbaum

is not prepared to reject the idea or practice of human rights

because she articulates a theory of capabilities that leaves hu-

man rights where they are: as a set of international standards

that at worst do no harm and at best play “an instrumental

role in preventing material disaster (in particular famine)”

(Nussbaum 2000, 96, referring in part to Sen 1981). She also

argues that there is still a place for the language of rights—

apart from their ontological dimensions—because it (1) im-

bues human capabilities with normativity, (2) underscoresthe

importance of human capabilities, (3) emphasizes that people

can choose to realize their capabilities or not, and, less plau-

sibly, (4) “preserves a sense of the terrain of agreement, while

we continue to deliberate about the proper type of analysis

at the more speciﬁc level” (Nussbaum 2000, 100–101).

While the central human capabilities that Nussbaum lists

(2000, 78–80) may very well overlap with some of the basic

theory reinforces my arguments here (see, e.g., Eberhard 2001a, 2001b,

2003).

24. After I had ﬁnished this article, I discovered that the German-

American psychoanalyst Erich Fromm had used the phrase “normative

humanism” ﬁrst in a 1954 Dissent article and then in his 1955 book The

Sane Society. As used by Fromm, however, the phrase means something

much different from my development of it here. Fromm used it to refer

to a set of universal criteria for measuring whether individuals were“sane”

in terms of the degree to which they met their own basic needs.

human-centered values that form part of the patterned and

prescriptive orderings I describe, I think it is premature to

enumerate them in the way Nussbaum does. Indeed, values

differ from capabilities in that they represent a second-order

cultural reﬂection on cognitive, physical, and emotional im-

peratives that are actually closer to what Nussbaum means

by “capabilities” even though her list contains capabilities that

go beyond them (e.g., “afﬁliation,” “other species,” and “con-

trol over one’s environment”). Nevertheless, the approach I

develop here assumes that what is most important is not basic

human functioning—important though this is—but the fact

that, in the absence of constraints, collectivities will create

normative systems that are based on the recognition of a basic

set of human-centered values.

There are several important dimensions to normative hu-

manism that need underscoring. First, normative humanism

does not anticipate particular results (i.e., speciﬁc types of

legal, moral, or other normative orderings) except within a

broad range informed by collective anthropological and other

analytical experience and a general sense of the limits imposed

by common cognitive, physical, and emotional imperatives.

In other words, normative humanism assumes that speciﬁc

“rights” or “obligations” or “duties” or “laws” cannot be pre-

dicted in advance; indeed, it can say relatively little about even

the likelihood or desirability of the adoption of certain cat-

egories—rights versus duties or some combination of these

or others altogether—at particular places and points in time.

It is clear from this that the fact of normative humanism

means a rejection of immanent or metaphysical versions of

universal human rights, but this does not mean that inter-

national human rights might not be adopted as a normative

system at certain places and times. In other words, human

rights can legitimately function as a local normative frame-

work, but their legitimacy will be derived not from their uni-

versality—as is assumed by all of the major foundational in-

struments of international human rights—but from the

conditions through which they emerge or are incorporated.

Second, normative humanism does not imply a radical plu-

ralism or relativism, because the range of possible rights or

duties, for example, is constrained by cognitive, physical, and

emotional requirements. This is the reason normative sys-

tems—again, those able to develop without consequential

constraints—are roughly patterned. Third, normative hu-

manism does not say anything about the scale at which col-

lectivities will organize themselves in this way or the likelihood

that normative orderings will endure; in other words, it is not

a theory of culture per se but relies on the fact that social

groupings will organize themselves so as to establish condi-

tions for meaningful interactions. Fourth, normative human-

ism is based on the assumption that human interests and

desires, articulated individually but necessarily within collec-

tivities of equally construed individuals, can be fully realized

only when the socially constituted orderings that place limits

on individuals are inherently dynamic, historically rich, and

capable of change. Again, to this extent universal human

Goodale Toward a Critical Anthropology of Human Rights 493

rights in their current hegemonic forms, as both idea and

practice, cannot serve as a framework in which social actors

will thrive irrespective of the actions of nation-states or

institutions.

Fifth, normative humanism, although primarily a descrip-

tion of actual social practices, is also necessarily progressive

in that it assumes that collectivities will, in fact, create pat-

terned humanistic orderings unless constrained from doing

so. And although history, reevaluated in these terms, reads

like one long catalogue of insidious constraints—military,

ideological, political—on the capacity of individuals in col-

lectivities to realize themselves through the production of

ideal normative systems, when the capacity is present the

necessary—though not sufﬁcient—conditions exist for hu-

man emancipation and some approximation of social justice;

indeed, the emergence of normative humanism in practice

can be seen as emancipation. This way of describing collective

ordering is admittedly optimistic in that it assumes that un-

constrained normative systems will reﬂect a balance between

the individual and the collective,

a balance that nevertheless

can have meaning only in light of local historical and cultural

imperatives.

“Power” is thus reconceptualized to mean—in

relation to normativity—the presence of constraints which

prevent the striking of this balance. The ever-presence of

power in these terms is evidence that normative humanism,

as an ideal process of collective social ordering, is not dom-

inant or universally inevitable and must struggle against other

normative possibilities which lack legitimacy as I have deﬁned

it here.

Finally, despite the fact that it also functions as an alter-

25. Indeed, as I have argued elsewhere, human rights discourse in its

current international and transnational forms tends toward a kind of

moral imperialism that results when the disciplinary power of human

rights discourse is employed in the service of transnational capitalist

relations of production (see Goodale 2005 and below).

26. In saying this, I should emphasize that I conceive of the relation-

ship between the individual and the collective differently from, for ex-

ample, Michael Ignatieff, whose theorizing on this point reinforces the

position of the individual within human rights practice (see Ignatieff

2001). “Normative humanism” expresses my understanding of the re-

lationship between the individual and the collective under unconstrained

circumstances in that it describes the importance of the collective in

articulating normative meanings but assumes that these meanings will

reﬂect a basic human-centeredness. It goes without saying that by de-

scribing the relationship between the individual and the collective in

these terms I do not intend to link normative humanism with a particular

moment in Western intellectual history; its use here is, in a sense, literal

and intentionally ahistorical. Simply put, “humanism” is the best way to

describe human-centeredness as a basic cross-cultural value.

27. I think it is obvious, however, that the assumptions underlying

normative humanism are much less “optimistic” than those underlying

the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which assumes (1) that

everyone is essentially the same by virtue of a common nature, (2) that

this human nature can be objectively described in detail, (3) that this

common human nature entails quite speciﬁc normative consequences

(i.e., rights), and (4) that a global framework erected through law is the

best mechanism for ensuring that these enumerated rights will be rec-

ognized and protected in practice.

native analytical framework to, for example, human rights,

normative humanism is above all a theory of social praxis.

Moreover, it very explicitly collapses the etic into the emic,

not vice versa. In other words, it assumes that ordinary social

actors will themselves, given the capacity to do so, construct

the normative frameworks that establish the conditions for

meaningful interactions, with the result that anthropological

knowledge about these local processes consists partly in sim-

ply rendering these preexisting frameworks. By describing

normative humanism in these terms I necessarily locate it

within a much broader and older social theoretical tradition

that similarly explored empirical frameworks within which

moral or ethical systems could be studied and understood.

The most obvious example of this earlier foundational work

is Durkheim’s Ethics and the Sociology of Morals (1993), in

which he sought a break from the twin intellectualconstraints

of Kantian and utilitarian approaches to ethics. As does Durk-

heim’s discussion of comparative ethics, my description of

normative humanism assumes that the search for or assertion

of a single dominant ethical principle is counterproductive

and, even more, unnecessary for a particular normativity—

for example, human rights—to achieve its purposes(freedom,

emancipation, justice, etc.). Moreover, along with recent neo-

Durkheimian attempts to break out of stiﬂing and ultimately

counterproductive dichotomies (e.g., Douglas and Ney 1998),

normative humanism represents a way of describing certain

important facts of ethical practice that avoids the two most

common theoretical errors in contemporary human rights:

rational individualism, on the one side, and a narrow cul-

turalism, on the other.

Although this is not the place for a full discussion of this,

it can be said preliminarily that a reconceptualization of hu-

man rights in these terms has certain implications for political

and social practice. First, human rights are preserved as a

potential framework for facilitating meaningful interactions

only if their legitimacy does not depend, as it does now, on

their formal transcendence (i.e., their immanent universal-

ism)

and their Roman ahistoricity. Rather, nation-states or

28. Nevertheless, there are important differences between normative

humanism and Durkheim’s approach to ethical issues. Despite the fact

that he deemphasized this in later writings, Durkheim’s sociology of

morals was conceived as a way to generate empirical data that could be

used for “improvement.” The study of social facts was therefore always

instrumental. As I have argued, a theory of normative humanism is,

rather, both a way of describing the conditionsfor potentialemancipation

through collective ordering and an explanation of how “human rights”

can be reconceptualized as a legitimate normative possibility. Emanci-

pation and legitimacy are not universally applicable “goals” in the strict

sense but rather the effects of a contested, relatively uncommon but actual

type of ethical practice.

29. By “immanent universalism” I mean a theory of normativity which

makes the individual, rather than culture, society, or institutions, the

ultimate source of rights, obligations, duties, and so on, and these rights,

obligations, etc., are immanent in all individuals, everywhere, irrevocably.

International human rights doctrine is, in substantial part, on this def-

inition, an immanent universalist normative theory. Describing human

rights as an immanent universalist normativity does not mean that, from

494 Current Anthropology Volume 47, Number 3, June 2006

institutions interested in intervening in or, at a larger scale,

directing the process by which collectivities create humanistic

orderings should characterize any resulting set of entitlements

or duties or normative suggestions as ultimately provisional

even if certain basic values (such as the value of life), as

interpreted in “local”

cultural and historical terms, will al-

most always merit a central position among them. Second,

this alternative framework for normative systems such as hu-

man rights inverts the direction from which legitimacy ﬂows.

Normative humanism’s rejection of the possibility of im-

manent universalism entails a rejection of doctrines of polit-

ical practice that repose the ultimate authority for legitimately

restraining individuals or otherwise imposing restraints in an

overarching sovereign. In other words, even though ideal col-

lective orderings, given the right conditions, will achieve some

measure of local predictability (social objectivity), a normative

system’s legitimacy is never detached from the ongoing set

of cultural and historical processes that constitute it. The

implication is that a sovereign, of whatever kind, can act only

as a kind of facilitator by taking steps to create the conditions

for the emergence of normative humanism in social practice.

Finally, the establishment of conditions for meaningful in-

teractions, the ways in which resulting orderings change and

are reconﬁgured, and what can be understood as “local ju-

risprudence”—the contextualized rationales for the emer-

gence of certain patterned and prescriptive frameworks—all

require formal understanding, and this means the study of

social practice. Anthropologists can play a fundamental role

in the production of knowledge about these processes, al-

though a thoroughly intersubjective anthropology will require

them to collaborate with activists, local intellectuals, and the

whole range of social actors who strive to enact normative

humanism. To this extent, it is more accurate to say that the

kind of study of social practices that I am referring to should

be anthropological without having to make claims about dis-

ciplinary authority (on this point, see Ferguson 1999). Besides

the broader epistemological dimensions of a critical anthro-

pology of human rights that I have already developed at some

length, there are three more that must be examined in greater

detail: cultural critique, ethnography (and other hybrid meth-

odologies), and intersubjectivity.

another angle, one could not also say that human rights “transcend”

culture, history, society, and so on. But since what makes human rights

“transcendent” is precisely their immanence, it is confusing to describe

human rights as anchored in a theory of transcendence, partly because

of the old debate in philosophy and religious studies over immanence

and transcendence but also because such a theory rests on false onto-

logical premises.

30. I mean to signal that I am not making an argument at this point

about social scale—about the size or type of collectivity to which the

idea of normative humanism applies. Scale in this sense is certainly salient,

but its importance relates to matters of institutional and bureaucratic

organization.

Cultural Critique

Like most productive anthropology over the past 20 years, a

critical anthropology of human rights is also anthropology as

cultural critique in the traditional sense (Marcus and Fischer

1986), but there are two other more speciﬁc ways in which

cultural critique is essential for those studying human rights

and other normative orders. First, there is a need for a critical

anthropology of human rights to participate in a cultural

critique of human rights as both an international regime of

legal and quasi-legal doctrine and institutional practice and

a hegemonic transnational discourse, the latter being what I

have described elsewhere (Goodale 2005) as an expression of

the only global superliberalism. In other words, to the extent

that “human rights” does not characterize the result of the

localized processes I describe above but rather refers to the

presence of a hegemonic normative system based on a theory

of immanent universalism, a cultural critique becomes in-

strumental in the sense that it seeks to contrast the disciplinary

tendencies that animate international human rights with the

social praxis I have described as normative humanism.

But there is a second way in which cultural critique is

relevant, and we can call this human rights as cultural critique.

When collectivities organize themselves so as to create the

conditions for meaningful interactions in such a way that

“human rights” characterizes the prescriptions that are an-

chored in a basic set of human-centered values, human rights

in this sense both resist attempts to constrain the capacity to

alter these conditions and serve as a ongoing critique of al-

ternatives, especially those in the service of the various trans-

national imperialisms. When human rights becomes cultural

critique in this way, anthropologists participate as cultural

interpreters along with local actors to draw the contrasts—

through both resistance and critical reﬂection—sothathuman

rights become actually emancipatory to the extent that in-

dividuals in collectivities are able to engage in meaningful

interactions

free from constraint.

Ethnography (and Other Hybrid Methodologies)

In order to be effective as cultural interpreters,

anthropol-

ogists, alone among the disciplines that study human rights

as idea and social practice, can employ an ever-shifting rep-

ertoire of methods that includes focused observation, long-

31. At the risk of being unduly repetitive for the sake of clarity, when

I speak of “meaningful interactions” I refer only to those that are “pat-

terned and prescriptive” and recognize the importance of a basic set of

human-centered values mediated by common cognitive, physical, and

emotional imperatives.

32. In describing the work of critical anthropologists of human rights

as cultural interpretation, I locate the study of the social practice of

normativity along the spectrum of the interpretative tradition within

anthropology and, more speciﬁcally, point to anthropologists’ indis-

pensable role in articulating the orderings of collectivities so that their

“lessons” can be employed in wider dialogues of economic and political

consequence.

Goodale Toward a Critical Anthropology of Human Rights 495

term interviewing, archival research (both historical and eth-

nohistorical), oral history, discourse analysis, ﬁlm and

multimedia, network analysis, cyberresearch, institutional eth-

nography, mobile ethnography,

and contextualized combi-

nations of these, as well as other techniques and strategies for

collaborating in the production of cultural knowledge and

knowledge about culture. Despite the fact that the anthro-

pological study of human rights is still embryonic and focused

almost entirely on the description of the social practice of

human rights, one can point to examples of the kind of tech-

nical eclecticism I am referring to.

But apart from the ability to employ and adapt a wide

range of methods, critical anthropologists of human rights

beneﬁt from something even more fundamental: a reliance

on hybrid methodologies. If methodologies are the systems

of explanation that justify the use of certain research methods

and not others, then hybrid methodologies are those that

consciously blur the boundaries between otherwise discrete

systems on the assumption that the practice of everyday life—

if not its ideational representations—cannot realistically be

objectiﬁed in the ways that rigid theories of method require.

Methodological hybridity in this sense is especially important

for the kind of anthropology of human rights I envision be-

cause it mirrors the social practices I have described as nor-

mative humanism in that local culture and history are me-

diated by a set of common imperatives.

33. By “mobile” I mean something different from “multisited,”which,

I would argue, is often used redundantly when joined with “ethnography.”

This distinguishes my usage from that in Marcus (1995), in which “mo-

bile” and “multi-sited” are used interchangeably. Doing focused obser-

vation and interviews in several sites for relatively long periods of time

can simply be described as “ethnography” and captures what most cul-

tural and social anthropologists have always done. (Wasn’t the study of

the kula ring “multisited ethnography”?) Mobile ethnography responds

to the fact of space-time compression and the attendant rapidity with

which ideas and practices, not to mention people themselves, enter and

reenter transnational currents. A mobile ethnography is in this sense an

ethnography of the chase, tracking ideas and practices where they lead

until some clarity is achieved. An ethnography of this kind is particularly

useful for research on transnational discourses like human rights.

34. Prominent among them would be Merry’s ambitious work, in

which she has been tracking the production of human rights discourse—

and, in the process, the production of culture—across a wide spatial and

intellectual range (see Merry 2005 but also 2001, 2003). A good example

that combines what I have called mobile ethnography with network and

institutional analysis is Annelise Riles’s 2000 book based on her study of

the “artifacts” that constitute and then reconstitute transitional human

rights discourse. Richard Wilson makes use of several innovative methods

in his recent study of the intersections between human rights discourse,

the politics of memory, and the shifting meanings of “truth” and “rec-

onciliation” in postapartheid South Africa (Wilson 2001). Other examples

can be found among the essays on “practicing ethnography in law” in

Starr and Goodale (2002), for example, those of Goodale on intellectual

biography, Grifﬁths on life histories, Hirsch on feminist participatory

research, and Merry on ethnography in the archives. For a history of the

emergence of eclectic methods, especially among anthropologists of law,

see Nader (2002) and, in particular, her discussion of the need to draw

from a range of techniques in researching “hegemonic processes in law”

(2002, 166–67).

To complete this discussion of the different dimensions of

a critical anthropology of human rights, it is necessary to

pursue the question of methodology somewhat further and

reﬂect on the problem of knowledge as it relates to the study

of human rights, because the relationship between anthro-

pology and its purposes is also a question of epistemology.

Intersubjectivity

In my brief history of the relationship between American

anthropology and human rights I indicated that the ﬁrst stir-

rings of what would eventually become a profound shift in

this relationship could be seen in the early to mid-1980s.

This movement accelerated with the establishment of a dis-

tinct section concerned with human rights in the AAA and

was reﬂected in Messer’s 1993 programmatic review article.

The reconstitution of anthropology’s formal orientation to-

ward human rights was most clearly (perhaps symbolically)

marked by the adoption by the AAA of the 1999 Declaration

35. My history of the relationship between anthropology and human

rights differs from the brief one given in the introduction to Wilson and

Mitchell’s recent edited volume (2003, 1–3). Their basic point is that

what they call the “cultural turn”—the moment of disciplinary critical

reﬂection that began in earnest in the 1980s, although it was presaged

by stirrings of dissent associated with postcolonial struggles and the U.S.

war in Vietnam in the 1960s and early 1970s, at least for U.S. anthro-

pologists—was the peak of relativist, antiuniversalist, and, by extension,

anti–human-rights writing and activity among anthropologists. This be-

gan to change, according to Wilson and Mitchell, only during the mid-

to late 1990s because of the greater efﬁcacy—and thus legitimacy—of

what they call a “new humanitarianism,” as reﬂected in various war-

crimes tribunals with teeth and the incorporation of human rightsnorms

into the constitutions of a number of new nation-states. They are exactly

right on the topic of international human rights and the emergence of

a powerful new global justice discourse, but to the extent that they relate

these developments to the history of anthropology’s engagement with

human rights their analysis is difﬁcult to reconcile with the history I have

already discussed above. To take only one example, in 1995, just after

the point when, according to Wilson and Mitchell, cultural relativism

was most effective in leading anthropologists to treatwith“criticaldisdain

many basic conceptions of the human rights framework” (2003, 1), the

AAA converted the former Commission for Human Rights into a per-

manent standing committee, an action which, as I have said, was the

culmination of a process of transformation that had begun in the mid-

1980s. I can think of two possible explanations for our different histories.

First, I have argued that critical reﬂection in anthropology led not to a

heightening of cultural relativism (which, at least as a topic fortheoretical

inquiry, had diminished since the 1950s) but to the pursuit of new epis-

temologies that had the effect of integrating anthropological researchwith

social activism, including movements based on human rights. Second,

perhaps this history looks different when viewed from the perspective of

British social anthropology (I am referring to the inﬂuence of anthro-

pology’s different geo-intellectual traditions, not the nationality of in-

dividual scholars). I have relied, justiﬁably I would argue, on the activities

of the largest association of professional anthropologists in the world,

the AAA—which includes many British scholars—as a marker for the

relationship between the discipline and human rights, but of course Brit-

ish anthropology has followed its own trajectory, particularly in theo-

retical areas, and scholars based in Britain (such as Wilson himself,though

he is now at the University of Connecticut) have been pioneers in the

ethnographic study of human rights practices.

496 Current Anthropology Volume 47, Number 3, June 2006

on Anthropology and Human Rights. There is an important

dimension to this shift that I have not examined until now

but that bears directly on this recent history and on a future

critical anthropology of human rights. At the same time that

anthropology as a discipline was reorienting itself in relation

to human rights, anthropologists were beginning to conduct

research and theorize in ways that reﬂected new positions on

the potential for anthropological knowledge. During this pe-

riod (i.e., from the 1980s on) anthropologists explored the

epistemological possibilities of intersubjectivity, which,

though it carried somewhat different meanings in linguistics

and discourse analysis, was taken to mean that the anthro-

pologist-as-subject no longer carried out research on objects

of knowledge—as the traditional scientiﬁc method assumed—

but rather participated in a collaborative process in which

anthropologists served as (perhaps, at times, more skilled) co-

subjects with the social actors with whom they interacted.

As is well known, the emergence of intersubjectivity as a

replacement paradigm of anthropological knowledge led to

parallel movements that, among other things, critiqued the

subject-object conventions of traditional ethnographic writing

(e.g., the absence of the anthropologist from the narrative,

the abuse of the ethnographic present, and so on) and, more

important for my purposes here, decentered the anthropol-

ogist from a position of intellectual and scientiﬁc privilege.

A recognition of intersubjectivity carries several implica-

tions for a critical anthropology of human rights. First, it

avoids the problem of agnosticism ﬁrst raised in the 1947

statement: that because no techniques existed for scientiﬁcally

evaluating the content or meaning of normative systems like

human rights, no anthropological knowledge about them was

36. The emergence of intersubjectivity as an alternative way of un-

derstanding the production of anthropological knowledge can be seen

throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s, though fewer anthropologists

over the past ﬁve years have made this idea explicit in their monographs

or articles (perhaps because it has become canonical?) (see, e.g., Csordas

1990; Dumont 1986; Hastrup 1990; Shore 1991). And just as the rea-

lignment of anthropology to human rights was presaged by Geertz’s

article, during the late 1970s and very early 1980s anthropologists dis-

covered (or rediscovered) the more general epistemological implications

for anthropology of developments in linguistics and laid the foundations

for the seismic rumblings of the mid-1980s (see, e.g., Crapanzano 1980;

Dwyer 1982; Tedlock 1983).

37. I realize that, as a problem in metaphysics, most discussions of

subject versus object are approached as a question of ontology, but I am

interested in the disappearance of the anthropological object and the

proliferation of subjects to the extent that a formal recognition of the

reality of current anthropological practice has changed the terms with

which knowledge is deﬁned and legitimated. Likewise, in highlightingthe

importance of intersubjectivity for a critical anthropology of human rights

I do not mean to enter into a full-blown consideration of what are

otherwise very important debates over, for example, the relationship

between a “philosophy of the subject” and reason. Thus I can only signal

here that in the longer work that is in process I am considering how

what Ju¨ rgen Habermas (1987) calls an “alternative way out of the phi-

losophy of the subject” (i.e., a theory of communicative action) sheds

light on the way anthropologists and their co-subjects collaboratively

produce knowledge about local normative orderings.

possible. The result, as we have seen, was ﬁrst a long period

of anthropological absence, then a period of reengagement

marked by political and social activism by individual anthro-

pologists and eventually its largest professional association,

and, ﬁnally, during the past ﬁve to ten years, a reconcep-

tualization of human rights as a cultural process and the be-

ginning of research on this basis.

Yet intersubjectivity intro-

duces a qualitatively different set of possibilities. Because it

represents a theory of knowledge that imparts truth value to

the social process of knowledge production itself (which in-

cludes the anthropologist) rather than to what results—what

is understood as an “object” in a different framework—an-

thropologists are able to study the constitution of normativity

holistically without needing to distinguish artiﬁcially between

“structure” and “agency” or the “culture of human rights”

and human rights themselves. This means, among other

things, that the idea of human rights is now a central topic

for anthropological inquiry (see Goodale 2006b).

Second, intersubjectivity, as I understand it here, has the

potential to mediate between political action and knowledge

(both self- and social). This explains in part the mechanism

that transforms human rights into cultural critique when hu-

man rights emerge in the absence of constraints. Anthropol-

ogists have a role to play here, again, as perhaps more skilled

co-subjects or at least as professionally interested collabora-

tors. When human rights form the basis for resistance to

attempts to alter the conditions necessary for meaningful in-

teractions, then knowledge overlaps with political action, and

when human rights in practice serve as the basis for critical

reﬂection on social conditions, then political (or legal) action

actually constitutes knowledge.

Finally, the position on knowledge I develop here is im-

portant for a critical anthropology of human rights because

it lays a theoretical foundation—for those who feel one is

needed—for anthropology’s formal engagement on behalf of

or in collaboration with individuals and collectivities who are

unable to resist. In other words, new possibilities for activism

are created when anthropology moves away from a high sci-

entiﬁc epistemology, a reliance on which framed the disci-

pline’s orientation to the practice of human rights until re-

cently. In this sense, it is possible to view the ambivalence

38. An activism that was, in most cases, distinguished from actual

anthropological research even if it was necessarily associated with or

motivated by it. In other words, until recently anthropologists did not

have epistemological grounds for engaging in human rights activism as

a legitimate sphere of anthropological inquiry.

39. Some good examples of research on “human rights as culture and

the culture of human rights” would be, again, Merry’s work (2001, 2003,

2005) and the essays in three recent edited volumes led by RichardWilson

(Wilson 1997; Cowan, Dembour, and Wilson 2001; Wilson and Mitchell

2003), who has recently been named director of an interdisciplinary

human rights institute at the University of Connecticut—a development

which also marks the shift in anthropology’s relationship to humanrights

and, perhaps more important, a nascent openness on the part of non-

anthropologists in the human rights community to anthropological

perspectives.

Goodale Toward a Critical Anthropology of Human Rights 497

that all but a small group of anthropologists felt toward hu-

man rights activism not as a question of motivation (or a

lack thereof) but as a problem of epistemological validity. To

this extent, my appeal to intersubjectivity parallels some of

the developments in action or engaged anthropology (or what

Roy Rappaport [1993] calls “the anthropology of trouble”

and Nancy Scheper-Hughes [1995] styles, with Guevaran rel-

ish, “militant anthropology”), though it rests on different,

and, I would argue, more sustainable grounds.

Loomings

There is a ﬁnal dimension to human rights that I wish to

examine, one that anthropology is also well placed to address.

This combines a focus on what can be understood as the

political economy of human rights discourse with its instru-

mental disciplinarity. Although the recent anthropological en-

gagement with human rights has been limited to topics or

questions considered more properly “anthropological”—the

implications for culture of human rights and vice versa, hu-

man rights as a framework for cultural survival, the ethnog-

raphy of human rights as social practice, the ethnography of

human rights as political strategy—I would argue that, as with

the type of inquiry into the practical philosophy of human

rights I have outlined above, a critical anthropology of human

rights should be broadened to include topics and questions

that encompass the instrumental and ideological aspects that

make human rights one of the most consequential of trans-

national regimes.

A political economy of human rights discourse is one that

studies the ways in which human rights ideas and practices—

which are rendered discursively inseparable in speciﬁc social

contexts—have become preeminently constitutive, so that

collective identity, social meanings, and personhood cannot

be understood in other terms even when—perhaps especially

when—moves are made to suggest alternatives. In their book

on “writing science,” Halliday and Martin (1993) employ a

political economy of discourse to reveal the constitutive pro-

cesses behind contemporary science education. Employing

their framework, it would be possible to show how the as-

sumptions embedded in human rights discourse are “chained

together into sequences of . . . relations and consequences”

and to recognize that “the work of [human rights] is nec-

essarily grammatical: naming, constructing and positioning

the [normative], and doing so in a way which builds social

40. In other words, there is an important difference between an al-

ternative epistemology that is based on strongly nonrational grounds and

one that continues to rely on the possibilities enabled by rationality, even

if (as with intersubjectivity) the conditions under which rationality

emerges in social practice—indeed, the nature of rationality itself (cf.

Habermas’s communicative rationality)—are critically reconceptualized.

The “emancipatory cultural politics” approach to human rights that I

have already described is clearly indebted to the epistemological inno-

vations of Rappaport, Scheper-Hughes, and others whose writings call

into question the nature of rationality itself.

relationships of power and knowledge” (Halliday and Martin

1993, xii). In order to critically frame the processes through

which human rights discourse “builds social relationships of

knowledge and power”—rather than, as international human

rights doctrine presupposes, discovers them within the natural

order of things—anthropologists must consider which inter-

ests (political, economic, military) are served through the

apotheosis of human rights and how a supposedly universal

set of rights (and perhaps corresponding duties) derived from

our supposedly universal humanness is transformed into what

Laura Nader would call a “controlling process” (1997).

Understood in this way, a political economy of human

rights discourse must be distinguished from several related

frameworks. When Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman

adopted a “political economy of human rights” (1979a,

1979b) as a general approach to their critique of the “Wash-

ington Connection and Third World fascism” and the print

media’s culpability in the mischaracterization of postwar In-

dochina, they meant that “justice” was an ideological mask

behind which the United States exercised its often brutal pol-

icies designed to expand and protect foreign markets for pri-

vate corporate interests. A political economy of human rights

discourse is also not the same as an analysis of the “politics

of human rights” (e.g., Evans 2001; Obrad 2002). Evans, for

example, is an advocate for a strong international human

rights regime and argues that the politics of globalization are

a barrier to the enforceability of human rights laws because

states place the highest value on open markets and interna-

tional trade, even if individual rights are violated as a result.

Finally, there is Ignatieff’s (2001) extended essay exploring the

problem of human rights as politics, by which he means some-

thing close to Chomsky and Herman’s “political economy of

human rights” but much less conspiratorial. He refers to a

set of failures by the United States to pursue a human rights

agenda consistently, failures which result more from the vi-

cissitudes of realpolitik than from any conscious effort to use

human rights as an excuse for economic expansion or to

facilitate what Chomsky and Herman call the “reconstruction

of imperial ideology” (1979b).

Yet each of these important analytical approaches begins

and ends at the level of structure or focuses on the broadest

frame within which human rights ideas and practices are

merely impacted—to greater or lesser degrees of both con-

sequence and intentionality—by political-economic forces.

The kind of political economy of human rights discourse that

41. In much the same way, the Dutch scholars Berma Klein Goldewijk

and Bas de Gaay Fortman (who is Professor of the Political Economy of

Human Rights at the University of Utrecht) study the political, economic,

and social contexts within which “traditional human rights strategies are

of limited effectiveness in responding to violations of economic, social,

and cultural rights” (Goldewijk and Forman 1999, vii). Their main ar-

gument is that a political economy of human rights demonstrates that

articulating underlying human needs in human rights language invests

these needs with social importance, which is the ﬁrst steptowardmeeting

them.

498 Current Anthropology Volume 47, Number 3, June 2006

I have in mind is one that requires anthropologists to trace

the connections between political-economic structures and

the disciplinary processes that both constitute liberal citizens

(and the notion of citizenship itself) and reinforce thosestruc-

tures. This strategy for research and analysis assumes that the

rights-bearing liberal citizen is a social and historical category

rather than primarily a type of social actor associated with

certain political and economic developments, and this cate-

gory is marked by the extent to which it is self-constituting.

In other words, if the emergence of the liberal citizen is a

necessary precondition for the rise, expansion, and eventual

consolidation of a transnational capitalist mode of produc-

tion, then a pressing area for anthropological inquiry is the

way in which human (and other) rights discourses produce

the thing they assume—a citizen endowed with irrevocable

rights that are entailed by a universal humanness. A critical

anthropology of human rights engages, therefore, in the wider

debates over the relationship between human rights and the

imperatives of hegemonic political-economic structures but

adds a dimension that has been missing: the speciﬁc ways in

which human rights discourse attracts social actors and com-

pels them to employ their capabilities in the service of trans-

national capitalist networks outside of the classic “institu-

tional architectures” that typically frame the sites that have

received most of our recent attention—the prison, the hos-

pital, the university, and so on.

Finally, what makes a political economy of human rights

discourse so urgent is the same thing that lends immediacy

to a critical anthropology of human rights more generally. As

my recent research in Romania and Bolivia demonstrates,

international human rights have become the vanguard in the

global consolidation and naturalization of (neo-)liberalism, a

process that most now agree has quickened because of the

demise of credible alternatives. There is, therefore, a current

need for an anthropological critique in the sense I have de-

veloped above. But there is also a need to pursue the possi-

bility of a reconstituted human rights, one that does not serve

as an ideological barrier to emancipation in practice but rather

resists the tendency toward moral imperialism associated with

immanent universalist normative theories, is able to “center”

(actually “recenter”) “personhood in international narrative”

(Herna´ ndez-Truyol 2002), and, perhaps most important, cre-

ates a permanent framework for the realization of human

capabilities.

Acknowledgments

This article took shape during a nine-month study leave made

possible through a Fulbright scholarship, and I would like to

thank the Council for International Exchange of Scholars

(CIES) for their assistance and generosity. During 2004 and

2005, portions of this article were presented at University

College London, the London School of Economics, and at

the University of Bergen. I am indebted to the faculty and

students at these institutions for their lively and productive

engagement during these events. My wider thinking about

anthropology and human rights has beneﬁted from numerous

conversations over the years with friends and colleagues, al-

though I alone am responsible for any inferences or proposals.

Finally, I would like to thank Benjamin Orlove and ﬁve anon-

ymous reviewers, whose suggestions and comments allowed

me to strengthen the article considerably.

Comments

Upendra Baxi

Faculty of Law, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL,

UK (baxiupendra@aol.com). 11 I 06

Goodale addresses two distinct but related tasks. Besides of-

fering a stunning critique and reconstruction of the “ambiv-

alent” engagements constituting the AAA’s public-policy re-

gime shifts with regard to human rights, Goodale also

reimagines the tasks of “a critical anthropology of human

rights.” Given rigorous space constraints, I here brieﬂyengage

the second theme, recast by Goodale as “normative human-

ism.”

The “progressive” agenda of a critical anthropology of hu-

man rights contests the appropriation of human rights via

co-optation and repression and aims at the recovery of “a set

of potentially emancipatory principles underlying human

rights discourse.” This entails a wider understanding of hu-

man rights as “coteries of concepts, practices, and experi-

ences” at “different levels,” constituting always-contingent re-

minders of ethnographic locations. Goodale gently resists

traveling with me as far as to maintain that the ﬁeld refers

to “protean forms of social action assembled, by convention,

under a portal named as ’human rights.’” Even so, it is not

clear how this larger landscape of meaning may address di-

verse human rights languages in their intertextuality and

paratextualties. The performative truths of these languages

enact the “core” meanings differently as ethical imperatives

and national and global governance, trafﬁcking in the symbols

of shared sovereignty, juridical production, and cultures (Baxi

2002, 2005).

A critical anthropology of human rights privileges anthro-

pology as a unique discipline identifying “a middle space

between the reiﬁed normativity of a regressive human rights

and the chaos of contemporary human rights praxis.” But

how may it persist in these binary contrasts in the face of

non-reductive understandings both of anthropology and of

human rights? In terms of a hermeneutics of human rights,

it certainly beneﬁts by going beyond the staid invocation of

Pannikar’s “diatopical hermeneutics” to a more nuanced re-

course exempliﬁed in corpus of Gadamer, Betti, Rorty, Dall-

mayr, and Ricoeur. Equally, a critical reading of the violence

Goodale Toward a Critical Anthropology of Human Rights 499

of the writing of the “political economy of human rights”

holds more promise when it moves beyond the ritual polem-

ical recourse to the “Washington Connection and Third World

fascism” to various pluralist habitus that contest the “apoth-

eosis of human rights” via narratives tracing the dialectical

relation between the politics of dominant and insurrectionist

human rights desire that I have called the politics of and for

human rights.

Might not the critical anthropology of human rights more

fruitfully address human suffering (see, e.g., Herzfeld 2001

and literature there cited), named differently by Arendt in

terms of the recurrent production of human rightlessness and

by Agamben in terms of the zone of indistinction between

“violence and right”? How might its offering cognize the di-

vergent anthropology genres constituted by, for example, phil-

osophical anthropology (Rorty), theological/literary con-

structions of human suffering (Scarry), medical anthropology

(Kleinman and Das), and anthropology of religion (Asad)?

These too coequally address and interrogate the “legitimacy”

of the vaunted, fractured, or fake universality of contemporary

human rights paradigms and the tasks of construction of a

“normative humanism.”

How is one to read a project constructing spontaneous

“collectivities” that “will, in fact, create patterned humanistic

orderings unless constrained from doing so,” especiallywithin

the logic of celebration of benign conceptions of sovereignty

which recast the state as “a facilitator” for the “emergence of

normative humanism in social practice”? How might this

speak to anthropology “at the margins of state” (Das and

Poole 2004)? Without gainsaying the tasks of “a theory of

social praxis” that ought to avoid the twin errors of “rational

individualism, on the one side, and a narrow culturalism, on

the other,” it is not clear how histories of contingent uni-

versality embedded in local histories might promise better

futures for human rights than those celebrated by universality

claims. How might this new project celebrating collectivities

of “equally construed individuals” and socially constituted

orderings that “place limits on individuals” and still pursue

future worlds that are “inherently dynamic, historically rich,

and capable of change” escape remystiﬁcation, despite the

charismatic plenitude of its Rousseau-like appeal? I here per-

force cryptically suggest the inherence of the dystopic within

that utopic.

At stake in this envisaged theory and practice of “norm-

ative humanism” remain the tasks of resituating ethnogra-

phies of “terror” and the craft of human-rights-oriented jus-

tiﬁcations of the “terror” of the law and the law as “terror.”

How may we pursue, outside the contexts of terror or the

global politics of mass cruelty (Baxi 2005 and the literature

therein cited), a “reconstituted human rights” paradigm in

terms of “freedom from constraints” for self-determining col-

lectivities? Goodale makes a singular contribution in inviting

us to contemplate a utopic critical anthropology of human

rights that even more fully revisits the violent nomos/anomie

of contemporary human rights theory, movements, and

markets.

Jane Cowan

Department of Anthropology, University of Sussex, Falmer,

Brighton BN1 9SJ, UK (j.cowan@sussex.ac.uk). 6 II 06

I share with Goodale a “critical” stance towards human rights

in the ﬁrst of the two senses he has helpfully distinguished:

insisting on a “distance” between rights and the anthropo-

logical analysis of them. I am also attracted by the second

sense of criticality he invites, drawn from Horkheimer and

Adorno, which involves tracing what has conspired to trans-

form human rights into a reiﬁed norm in the service of global

neoliberalism in order to recover their original critical im-

pulse. I applaud the bold attempt to retheorize human rights

in light of our anthropological knowledge—the accumulated

experience of our comparative endeavors, as well as our meth-

odological and epistemological reﬂections.

I remain intrigued, however, rather than (yet) convinced,

by “normative humanism” as an “alternative paradigm for

human rights.” I ﬁnd the term infelicitous. Although not

against redeﬁning terms as such—the struggle over termi-

nology characterizes the work of theorizing as much as of

everyday politics—I think that “humanism” carries too much

connotational baggage. This includes its European pedigree

in the Renaissance shift from a God-centred to a human-

centred universe, a shift that “humanism” both describes and

advocates. Goodale retains this orientation, along with the

Enlightenment ideal of the just community “committed to

the full realization of both individuals and collectivities,”while

seeking to loosen such notions from their European moorings.

To be sure, its human-centredness is likely to render this

reformulation unpersuasive for societies and groups for whom

the source of moral authority lies outside or beyond “the

human.” Still, as adherents of various fundamentalisms sys-

tematically insinuate themselves into power (not least in the

United States), we should be wary of abandoning this human-

centredness. At the same time, I ﬁnd increasingly compelling

those “deep green” arguments that deﬁnitions of the “good”

and the “just” must take into account the whole of planetary

life and its future and that human-centrednesss (at least a

particular version of it) is to blame for our present ecological

malaise. Reconceptualizing human rights could be an op-

portunity to rethink how humans are and should be situated

vis-a` -vis nature in rapidly transforming contemporary con-

ditions and how that relation impinges on human “rights.”

What is implied when Goodale formulates a way of de-

scribing, an analytical framework for, and a theory of social

action as an “ism”—a sufﬁx associated with ideological move-

ments and grand explanatory models? The adjective “nor-

mative” reinforces the hunch that the phrase refers more to

a project or program than to description/analysis/theory. In

the end, it seems to be both: its ambiguity is symptomatic of

500 Current Anthropology Volume 47, Number 3, June 2006

an intervention that oscillates between theorization and mis-

sion. On the one hand, Goodale starts from a set of anthro-

pologically informed claims about human societies: that

“given the right circumstances” people will organize them-

selves, that they will seek to create “meaningful interactions

that are both patterned and prescriptive,” and that their prac-

tices “will recognize and formally incorporate a basic set of

human-centered values.” The formulation has the merit of

acknowledging a wide array of forms of normatively ordered

human sociality. It also explicitly recognizes the socially ne-

gotiated, historically dynamic, and open-ended nature of so-

cietal forms and values. On the other hand, Goodale’s de-

scription/analysis/theory is not philosophically agnostic. It

expresses a faith that collectively created orderings will be,

under the right conditions, “humanistic” and “progressive”

and, indeed, that only those which are so deserve the des-

ignation. In this second sense, normative humanism stands

as “an ideal process of social ordering” (my emphasis) in ten-

sion with other normative possibilities.

I would query two elements of Goodale’s formulation. First,

assuming that values will tend to be human-centred begs

important questions. Goodale never deﬁnes “human-centred”

but treats it as roughly equivalent to “humanistic”—hardly a

more self-evident term—as well as implicitly good. We might

take the value that anthropologists gloss as “honor,” still per-

vasive in many societies, and ask in what ways it is human-

centred and for which humans. Values and norms are better

conceptualized as socially centred; rather than necessarily en-

hancing human capacities, they may as easily underpin so-

cietal ordering processes which differentiate humans, cate-

gorically and individually, in terms of their position, status,

and putative worth. Goodale’s attempt to explain disruptions

to normative systems that impede human self-realization as

products of “constraint,” implicitly external, similarly under-

estimates endogenous dynamics. Even though we must ac-

knowledge the distortions imposed by externally directed pro-

cesses, it is hardly adequate to reconceptualize power as—in

effect, to reduce power to—”the presence of constraints.”

I appreciate Goodale’s project of reinvestigating the history

of anthropological engagement with human rights—both his

empirically grounded archival scholarship and his creative

reinterpretations—and I endorse his effort to reconceptualize

human rights in terms of myriad forms of human sociality

rather than a singular, immanent humanness. But I am not

ready to cede my more tragic and ambiguous reading of hu-

man sociality to Goodale’s Enlightenment optimism.

Ulf Johansson Dahre

Department of Social Anthropology, University of Lund,

Lund, Sweden (soc-ujo@cassandra.net.lu.se). 11 I 06

Goodale’s attempt to bring anthropology back to the global

human rights scene is ambitious, but his is certainly not an

easy task. His examination of the relations between anthro-

pology and the human rights scene since Herskovits, on behalf

of the AAA, formulated the now (in)famous relativistic cri-

tique of the universal rights in 1947 is interesting and relevant,

although it underestimates the human rights interest of Amer-

ican anthropologists during this period. The AAA was silent,

but not all anthropologists were silent. We may also recall

that human rights did not become an object of extensive

public debate, at least in Europe, until the 1980s. Therefore,

one might argue that anthropologists did not arrive as late

on the scene as Goodale argues. However, the practical in-

volvement of anthropologists in human rights has not had

the same theoretical ramiﬁcations as that of politicalscientists,

lawyers, and philosophers. Given today’s integration of theory

and practice, I agree with Goodale that anthropologists may

certainly make a contribution to the question why the concept

of human rights still does not seem to work according to its

premises in a world that is more democratic than ever.

The historiography serves as the background for introduc-

ing the concept of “normative humanism,” which Goodale

argues will bring anthropology back to the human rights

scene. Although the effort is well intended, I doubt that it

will succeed. Normative humanism is, according to Goodale,

a “central analytical framework” and both a way of describing

social reality and a ground for normative conditions. It con-

tains human-centered values that people will establish if we

let them. It is a bottom-up approach to human rights, re-

constituting the discourse to make it both effective and le-

gitimate in the eyes of people living their local lives. This is

nothing less then a fundamental critique of the global liberal

elitism constituting the UN human rights regime. For Goodale

human rights are just another Western imperial project, the

West against the rest. This critique seems to be just another

version of the relativism put forward by Herskovits. Realizing

where his argument is leading, Goodale argues that his new

concept is not relativism but a better tool for analyzing and

discussing human rights, a theory of social praxis. He argues,

however, that “normative humanism rejects immanent uni-

versalism.” Is not the advantage of universalism the possibility

of comparing, measuring, and criticizing local and national

violations? Is he not implying that we cannot really criticize

a local practice from the horizon of another practice, and, if

this is so, do we not have to accept female genital mutilation

because it is a local tradition built on local values?

There is no such thing as a particularly anthropological

orientation to human rights, and launching a new concept

that no one but a few anthropologists will understand is not

the right path. Discussing human rights, whether we like it

or not, requires concepts that other disciplines and praction-

ers in the UN, governments, and NGOs are using. There is

nothing outside the current human rights text, and the text

is already written. I agree with what Goodale implies—that

human rights are too important to be left to law and politics—

but there is no way between universalism and relativism that

anthropologists can carve out for themselves, and even if there

were one, what would we be gaining if we could still only

Goodale Toward a Critical Anthropology of Human Rights 501

talk to anthropologists? Since the problem is that we are not

discussing human rights with other disciplines, we have to

take part in the discussion with our experiences, our praxis-

grounded theories, and what-not if we want to be taken

seriously.

When Goodale turns, in closing, to the application of po-

litical economy to human rights discourse, he makes a point

on which we can agree, and it is here that anthropology may

make the contribution he hopes for.

Thomas Hylland Eriksen

P. O. Box 1091 Blindern, N-0317 Oslo, Norway

(t.h.eriksen@culcom.uio.no). 19 XII 05

What is missing in Goodale’s sensible and useful article about

American anthropology and human rights, apart from telling

empirical examples, is a full appreciation of the shifting social

and cultural contexts of the period he is dealing with and

their implications for anthropological thought and practice.

The necessity to rethink and eventually abandon anthropol-

ogy’s tendency towards moral relativism was not a result of

internal developments in the discipline but a response to

changes in the rest of the world. Although many anthropol-

ogists were in the 1980s happy to discuss and debunk cultural

essentialism—characteristically dodging the riskier and murk-

ier ﬁeld of human rights—there were also many, as Goodale

points out, who accepted and indeed embraced a new set of

normative obligations.

This development was forced upon most anthropologists,

not chosen by them. When Roger Keesing (1994) wrote, in

the late 1980s, about Kwaio appropriations of concepts of

culture which echoed the dominant anthropological culture

concept, he came close to depicting a society which no longer

needed anthropologists to identify it: it was now perfectly

capable of doing it ifself. Similarly, people we meet as eth-

nographers in non-Western societies often have radical agen-

das favouring social change and cultural reform, and many

of them would regard the relativist approach of classic an-

thropology as reactionary pap in defence of the status quo.

What has made normative cultural relativism in the vein of

the 1947 AAA statement indefensible is the impact of global-

ization and transnationalism on societies almost everywhere,

not least in the countries where most anthropologists live. Es-

pecially in Western Europe but also in North America, the

debates about human rights and cultural pluralism with respect

to immigrants and their descendants have led some anthro-

pologists to take normative positions while others (presumably

a majority) have been forced to “revise and resubmit” their

ideas about cultural differences. In Norway, a debate about

female circumcision among immigrants from North-East Africa

involved the wholesale condemnation of social anthropologists

for irresponsible cultural relativism in a leading article in the

country’s largest newspaper. The main target of the attack, the

respected Africanist Aud Talle, responded a year later with a

book (Talle 2003) which exempliﬁes Goodale’s “critical an-

thropology of human rights” by combining a superb account

of the cultural rationale and social forces maintaining the prac-

tice with original policy advice. Around the same time, the

murder of a Swedish woman of Kurdish origin by her father

elicited heated debate in the Swedish media, with important

contributions from the cultural anthropologist Mikael Kurkiala.

Arguing that a Kurdish cultural script encompassing notions

of honour, gender, etc., had to be taken into account in any

attempt to understand the murder, Kurkiala was met by angry

reactions from Swedish feminists who claimed that he was

acting the role of the useful idiot for the anti-immigrant extreme

right (see Eriksen 2006 for a full account of both cases). His

view, elaborated in a recent book (Kurkiala 2005), was simply

that no understanding of the individual and his/her rights is

complete without a certain familiarity with the relevant social

and cultural contexts, that such contexts vary, and that it would

be foolish and dangerous to pretend otherwise.

These examples indicate that anthropological sensitivity to

local contexts and respect for cultural systems different from

our own have long since ceased to be merely quaint and

charming in the public sphere. Moreover, they show that the

critical anthropology of human rights advocated by Goodale

is being practised already, often in situations where anthro-

pologists engage with a wider public sphere (but also in

interdisciplinary settings such as the Human Rights Institute

directed by Richard Ashby Wilson at Connecticut).

The challenge posed around the middle of Goodale’s article,

where he states that “reiﬁed, hypernormative human rights

. . . cannot serve as the basis for realizing their aim, . . . the

creation of just communities,” is well taken. It may not be a

very original observation, but the subsequent discussion, in-

voking the cultural critique inherent in the anthropological

project as well as dismissing neoliberalism as inadequate on

humanist grounds, showcases the emancipatory potential of

anthropology and reveals the importance of anthropologists’

engagement with a wider public sphere characterized by ig-

norance and misrepresentations of what contemporary an-

thropologists are trying to do. Neoliberalist propaganda and

the globalization of fast capitalism, which may be consistent

with a superﬁcial understanding of human rights, need the

counterweight of local knowledge, but this time its normative

underpinning is a universalist humanism (in the tradition of

Rousseau rather than Voltaire) instead of cultural relativism.

Michal B. Likosky and Joy E. Mooberry

School of Oriental and African Studies, University of

London, London, UK (ml29@soas.ac.uk) / School of Law,

University of Oxford, Oxford, UK. 6 II 06

Goodale’s piece combines a history of the uneasy relationship

between certain elements of the American Anthropological

Association and the international human rights movement

with a proposal for a critical anthropology of human rights.

502 Current Anthropology Volume 47, Number 3, June 2006

His critical anthropology aims to reconcile some of the long-

standing tensions between normative universalism and cul-

turally situational conceptions of human rights. Goodale ex-

amines anthropologists’ struggle to resolve the episte-

mological, methodological, and ideological controversies that

have shaped twentieth-century academics’ attempts to engage

with contemporary human rights movements. These are

murky, turbulent waters, and he does us a service by at-

tempting to chart them.

He rightly points out the contribution that anthropologists

have made to broadening the deﬁnition of human rights to

include culture and collective rights, and it would have been

useful to ﬂesh this point out. Besides the areas Goodale ref-

erences, anthropologists have played an important role in

rearticulating social demands against international ﬁnancial

institutions as human rights claims, work done from both

within and outside of institutions such as the World Bank

Group. However, their manifold contributions raise ques-

tions: What is the signiﬁcance of understanding the diverse

roles that anthropologists play in creating human rights in

varied subject areas, geographies, and issue arenas as a co-

herent, concerted movement? Can something more broadly

be said about how anthropologists reconcile epistemological

considerations with social action aimed at broadening the

docket of human rights?

The discussion of the role of anthropologists in relation to

political movements falls mainly within the ﬁrst half of Good-

ale’s article. The second half aims to address what he sees as

an impasse reached by anthropologists and the human rights

movement. Goodale identiﬁes a conﬂict between the imma-

nent universalism of international human rights and an ap-

proach which sees human rights as a social and cultural prac-

tice. In attempting to resolve this conﬂict, he presents a

“critical anthropology of human rights” that aims to com-

plement the human-rights-as-social-praxis approach while

maintaining an engagement with the underlying normative

character of human rights that the international human rights

movement propounds. Moreover, he seeks to displace the

movement’s immanent universalism with a comparative em-

pirical approach to human rights norms. Speciﬁcally, he pro-

poses a “normative humanism” by which he means that “in

the absence of constraints, collectivities will create normative

systems that are based in the recognition of a basic set of

human values.”

One of the article’s explicit aims is to speak to a larger

audience outside of anthropology. An example of Goodale’s

theory at work would have helped to clarify the beneﬁts of

his approach. It would allow readers outside of anthropology

to understand how his proposal ﬁts within previous episte-

mological and methodological controversies framing anthro-

pology’s relationship to human rights and suggest its broader

implications for human rights movements. This would pro-

vide more continuity between sections and notonlyilluminate

his proposal but also clarify the underlying logic of the article.

At times the “critical anthropology of human rights” is am-

biguous (perhaps purposefully so), and examples would make

more concrete what he has in mind. If a critique of the in-

ternational human rights movement is its tendency toward

“immanent universalism” and a “Roman ahistoricity,” then

the proposed solution should be grounded in concrete ex-

amples even in its exposition. The article does reference key

works in the anthropology of law, which has certainly ad-

vanced our understanding of the relationship between human

rights movements and critical theory. Limited mainly to a

brief discussion of Merry’s important work and n. 36, the

relationship between this subdiscipline’s contribution and

Goodale’s proposed framework is underdeveloped.

Many of the controversies Goodale discusses are more

broadly applicable. When questions of social justice and

equality are at stake, the classic struggle between the descrip-

tive and normative, the “is” and the “ought,” can divide ac-

ademic disciplines. Pulled by social movements, academics

question the relationship between a description of the world

and its use in policy-making arenas shaping the very world

they seek to describe. In the twentieth century, this struggle

can be seen in many disciplines. Theory once propounded

can take on a life of its own. Law, lawyers, and judges can

and do draw from these disciplines in an attempt to shape

legal doctrine. Thus, Goodale’s research furthers our under-

standing of the reciprocal relationship between disciplinary

and policy arenas—a relationship that can have consequences

not only for the discipline but also for legal doctrine.

Ellen Messer

144 Lake Shore Rd#3, Brighton, MA 02135, U.S.A

(emesser@gwu.edu). 15 I 06

In 1988–90, as background to my contribution to the Wenner-

Gren-sponsored panels on anthropology and public policy

(“engaged anthropology”), I explored why anthropologists

seemed to have been left out of human rights policy for-

mulations and discussions. As an anthropologist, I proposed

that the real challenge to assertions of universality in human

rights was not that there did not exist in all cultures some

concepts of rights and duties that could be compared to hu-

man-rights codes or basic ideas that social membership car-

ried with it certain rights and obligations guaranteeing phys-

ical protection and subsistence. Instead, the main challenge

was who was classiﬁed as fully human and therefore deserving

of rights and who was not. This “human classiﬁcation” fram-

ing and formulation of the human rights problematic met

resistance both from legal experts such as Philip Alston, who

informed me that it destroyed the very concept of human

rights and this was why international lawyers struggling to

develop human rights formulations and legal covenants from

the 1940s had marginalized anthropologists (and also phi-

losophers like Maritain), and from anthropologist critics,who

preferred to blast human rights as hegemonic transnational

discourse.

Goodale Toward a Critical Anthropology of Human Rights 503

Nevertheless, cross-cultural discussions of rights (and du-

ties), their substantive contents and prioritization, and com-

parative notions of “human being” and “social person” are

demonstrably part of the anthropological (Messer 1993,

1996a, 2002), Latin American (Messer 1995, 2001), food

(Messer 1990, 1996b, 2004), and more general (Messer 1997,

1998) human rights literature and document from a “human

classiﬁcation” perspective that anthropologists have been ac-

tively engaged in debating human-rights-relevant theory and

contributing to its formulation and practice, especially in the

arenas of economic, social, and cultural rights (nutrition and

health) and the rights of collectivities and of women but also

in those of basic civil-political rights and genocide. Precedents

include Boas’s studies of in-group–out-group dynamics and

his effort to conceptualize how to create global citizens of the

world, Durkheim’s attempts to deﬁne moral education and

to understand the constraints of social classiﬁcation, and later

theoretical and ethnographic studies of ethnicity and plural-

ism (see Stavenhagen 1990, 2004) and of the disparate sources

of violence and genocide that are consequences of this human

classiﬁcation process (e.g., Tambiah 1992 versus Kapferer

1998; Kuper 1986), and all contribute to this background

(Messer 1996a, 167–69). Yet their perspectives remain mar-

ginal to the writings of Goodale and colleagues. Why?

Anthropologists usually publish in anthropology journals,

not those refereed by legal and political scholars. Prior to the

1990s, furthermore, many did not publish human classiﬁ-

cation studies as “human rights.” In the 1990s, as anthro-

pologists encountered human rights claims and counterclaims

at all social levels, they engaged human rights more directly

in multileveled, pluralistic ethnographies, which also tend to

be multisited in space and time. A watershed was the 1995

AAA annual meeting, with its human rights theme and hun-

dreds of papers that addressed human rights in theory and

practice. Around this time, as Goodale notes, anthropologists

began to contribute critical cultural-political theory (Turner

1997) and more contextualized studies (Wilson 1997) as well

as to write on the process of pluralist human rights formu-

lation (Messer 1997) and the political uses (and abuses) of

human rights rhetoric (Schirmer 1998; Scheper-Hughes

1997). Anthropologists also became more politically involved

in the human-rights/development encounter, becoming

“scholars as activists” (Nagengast and Ve´lez-Iba´n˜ez 2004) or

professionals as activists (Farmer 1999) both within the AAA

and in the world.

Some of these discussions incorporate demands for “cul-

tural relativism” but in its “soft” form. These recent writings

seek not to hide ﬁndings of rights in conﬂict but to understand

them, especially where multiple notions of individual and

collective rights pose ethical dilemmas for populations, pol-

iticians, and anthropologists (e.g., Dean and Levi 2003) and

where ofﬁcial human rights approaches do little to relieveand

sometimes aggravate state-supported oppression and socio-

economic inequalities (e.g., Schirmer 1998). All suggest that

anthropologists have important roles to play in explicating

and facilitating pluralist interpretations of human rights, roles

that may or may not correspond to Goodale’s “normative

humanism,” “the requirements of a thoroughly intersubjective

anthropology,” and the “political economy of human rights

discourse.”

Annelise Riles

Department of Anthropology, Cornell University, Ithaca,

NY 14853, U.S.A. (ar254@cornell.edu). 16 I 06

In this and related pieces, Goodale has done the discipline a

service by raising important questions about the nature of

anthropology’s contribution to human rights issues. Although

he is not the ﬁrst to argue that anthropology as a discipline

is not sufﬁciently engaged with human rights concerns, I

strongly agree with him that it now stands to make a distinct

and imperative contribution. I differ with him only on exactly

what that contribution might be. His argument for an ap-

proach he terms “normative humanism” proceeds from the

premise that what is missing from human rights is a proper

theory of human capacities and the nature of human eman-

cipation and a proper set of critiques of human rights doc-

trines and institutions. It would be convenient if this were

so, since what anthropologists do most comfortably is pro-

duce such theories and critiques, but in my view this as-

sumption suffers from a misunderstanding of the nature of

the social production of human rights knowledge.

Although the article never explicitly answers the question

why anthropology has been “exiled” from the human rights

regime, the implicit claim is that anthropologists’ own lack

of interest is to blame. Will anthropologists’ newfound desire

for relevance in itself be enough to bring us into the human

rights mainstream, then? I think not. It is not that the kinds

of critiques and arguments that Goodale proposes are absent

in the human rights world. On the contrary, as I and others

have shown (Riles 2006; Redﬁeld 2005; Rosga 2005), a skep-

tical, critical, self-reﬂexive, and theoretically informed un-

derstanding of human rights regimes is almost a hallmark of

human rights expertise. In my experience, all sophisticated

human rights actors take it as a starting point of their expert

competence that while one talks as if rights were absolute,

one understands that in practice they are always constructed

and, unfortunately, compromised by people like themselves.

The problem (for human rights actors as much as anthro-

pologists) is that such critiques cannot, in their given form,

become part of human rights documents and policy propos-

als. As I have argued elsewhere (Riles n.d., 2006), human

rights administrations are technocratic, instrumentalist forms

1. As a professional, I ﬁnd that the most productive inter-(multi-or

pluri-)disciplinary engagement with human rights is one that explores

the promise and practice of human rights as a framework for justice and

development from legal, political-economic, and sociocultural perspec-

tives in clear language. Examples of such instructional materials areavail-

able under “human rights” resources (syllabi, Messer) at aaanet.org.

504 Current Anthropology Volume 47, Number 3, June 2006

of knowledge that work according to a very different logic

from humanistic and social theory. Hence, when anthropo-

logical theory encounters these regimes, it is generally either

ignored or, worse, digested into fodder for further techno-

cratic interventions (ethnographic descriptions get churned

into “facts” about abuses that the human rights regime could

take on; critical perspectives such as gender get turned into

a word to be inserted in human rights documents without

any rethinking from a gendered perspective of the larger tech-

nologies of human rights intervention). Most disturbing, per-

haps, is that anthropologists themselves, when they engage

these regimes, often seem to translate themselves in ways that

seriously compromise the originality and integrity of their

larger commitments (Jean-Klein and Riles 2005).

Our unique contribution lies not in new theories but in

the commitments that deﬁne our unique method, ethnog-

raphy. Ethnography is not one of many “hybrid methodol-

ogies”; it cannot be, since it entails an ethical commitment

to stay engaged in precisely the sort of intersubjective acts of

knowledge production that Goodale describes, even if that

collaboration takes us far aﬁeld theoretically from the debates

of mainstream human rights discourse or, for that matter,

mainstream anthropological theory. It is precisely this kind

of commitment and this kind of humility and empathy that

are lacking in the human rights regime.

In this respect, I read the 1947 AAA “Statement on Human

Rights” somewhat differently from Goodale, as a historically

situated and hence circumscribed effort to make a stand

against the arrogance and epistemological imperialism of the

human rights regime. Its willingness to name the hegemonic

ambitions of legal and technocratic knowledge is refreshing,

even moving, and for this reason it has had considerably more

currency in human rights circles than anthropologists realize.

Indeed, I ﬁrst encountered it as required reading in a course

on international law at the Harvard Law School.

Today as in 1947, human rights discourse needs humility,

and the best ethnography represents the fruits of methodo-

logical humility—the insights of the ethnographer’s coming

to terms with what he or she could not comprehend from

the start. From this point of view, what is needed is not

another “permanent framework for the realization of human

capacities”—that is precisely the kind of project the human

rights apparatus takes on and absorbs with gusto—but rather

a model for the human rights world of how to listen to and

engage with the terms of those outside it. But we will have

to practice what we preach, and that requires listening, also,

to the practices of human rights administrators. In other

words, perhaps before we can debate how best to intervene

in human rights issues we need to give further ethnographic

attention to the very nature of such interventions.

Jennifer Schirmer

Centre for Development and the Environment, University

of Oslo, Box 1116 Blindern, 0317 Oslo, Norway

(jennifer.schirmer@sum.uio.no). 10 I 06

Although Goodale raises important issues about the role an-

thropologists can and should play in addressing human rights

discourse, his discussion of the history of the way anthro-

pologists have engaged in this discourse remains incomplete.

What he fails to acknowledge is that anthropologists have in

many different ways implicitly addressed issues of rights even

as they have been reluctant to ﬁt social practices into pre-

established categories of international law and philosophy.

Arguably, anthropologists have been among the most active

of professions in placing the issues of rights and the practices

associated with them in context; they simply have not called

them human rights or taken on the issue explicitly. When a

group of us put together a short bibliography in 1987 (Schir-

mer, Reteln, and Wiseberg 1987, 1988) and a book in 1988

entitled Human Rights and Anthropology (Downing and Kush-

ner 1988), it was to encourage anthropologists to enter the

world of human rights discourse and practice more directly

and explicitly. In that work, many of the questions raised by

Goodale were addressed in the articles and in a suggestive yet

far from complete 70-page selected bibliography of works

related to anthropology and human rights. It was a call to

see human rights “within . . . the ancient social language of

reciprocity, community, relations, and moral obligations”

(Schirmer 1998, 92). This discussion also provided a critique

of the liberal humanist call for universal human rights as a

product of a particular society and culture.

While it is a disappointing that Goodale ignores these ef-

forts, it is heartening that he has reengaged the issue of human

rights in anthropology and called for a critical and ethno-

graphic approach to the constitution of human rights dis-

course. He makes explicit the nuanced contributions anthro-

pologists can make by broadening the very deﬁnition of

human rights, plagued by legalistic formulas and philosophic

naturalisms. Nonetheless, as in so many discussions of human

rights, we are still left with an underlying essentialism that

Goodale himself attacks in the work of other writers: through-

out his own article there is an underlying assumption that

there is a knowable set of “human capabilities” and a set of

rights that will lead to some abstracted idea of human eman-

cipation. He assumes, rightly, that universalistic human rights

discourse often operates in the service of particular structures

of power (capitalism, imperialism, etc.) and that anthropology

can serve as a corrective cultural critique. Yet his answer to

universalistic standards is a claim that this critique along with

that of local actors can become emancipatory and allow in-

dividuals “to engage in meaningful interactions free from con-

straint.” Is this not yet another vague universalism that begs

the question whether there is a society free of constraint? And

if no such society exists, does this not raise the further ques-

Goodale Toward a Critical Anthropology of Human Rights 505

tions whose interactions are to be freed from which con-

straints and how this is to be decided? And does not Goodale’s

emphasis on individual rights, ironically, reveal a particular

liberal humanist political and cultural predilection?

We as anthropologists need to recognize that the debate

about whether human rights are culturally speciﬁc or uni-

versal takes us in the wrong direction; whose rights and which

rights will always be up for debate. But as the discussionabout

human rights makes clear, the ability of various groups and

claims to be heard and heeded is not equal, and that should

lie at the heart of the question of human rights discourse.

Thus it may be that we need a universal standard that helps

to underscore and guarantee open dialogue about the issue

of rights and cultural speciﬁcity. As I argued in 1988, the issue

of rights is the issue of power, especially state power, and it

is important for us as anthropologists to remind others what

that means. As I said then and still believe, we need universal

standards but universal standards that support “contextual-

ized diversely informed human rights standards, [for] those

struggling with perceptions and ideas . . . about human re-

lations that reﬂect an ancient social language and are thus

incompatible with the dominant legal and cultural logics in

which they ﬁnd themselves living and dying—with little

choice or voice” (Schirmer 1998, 102). Without this under-

lying premise, anthropology becomes just another discipline

that hinders human rights from becoming relevant social

practice.

Richard Ashby Wilson

Department of Anthropology, University of Connecticut,

U-1205, Storrs, CT 06268, U.S.A. (richard.wilson@

uconn.edu). 9 I 06

Goodale is to be commended for his lucid history of an-

thropology’s initial repudiation of and then eventual engage-

ment with international human rights and for his clear man-

ifesto for a “critical anthropology” of human rights. His

blueprint for the future relies upon a predominantly cultur-

alist theory of human rights inspired by cultural critique and

anthropological formulations of intersubjectivity. Here, hu-

man rights are apprehended as primarily ideational represen-

tations embedded in other systems of ideational representa-

tions—“human-centered values” that play a key role in

“normative systems,” in contrast to structural formulations

of rights, which draw attention primarily to the exercise of

coercive power by state and intergovernmental institutions.

Goodale encourages us to embark upon a comparative an-

thropology of human rights, and he ﬁnds value in Pannikar’s

“diatopical hermeneutics,” an approach that seeks to identify

corollaries to human rights in local cultural and religious

contexts. There are echoes here of Geertz’s (1983) “law is

culture” essay, which examines core concepts within three

different legal traditions (”Indo,” Islamic, and Malaysian) in

order to unlock the grand schema of cultural thought hidden

within them. Here, as in Goodale’s view, anthropologists of

law and rights emerge as cultural interpreters, and their role

is to translate between integrated cultural systems.

It is important, however, to acknowledge the possible lim-

itations of a culturalist approach. In Geertz’s essay there was

very little examination of how local ideas of law had been

embedded within and refashioned by long experiences of co-

lonial rule and subjected to political contestation within the

cultures concerned. And Pannikar’s essay elides the fact that

dharma is a central part of a caste system which denies full

human and jural status to “untouchables” and has faced sig-

niﬁcant opposition from an Indian Supreme Court that jus-

tiﬁes its afﬁrmative-action rulings on human rights grounds.

Cultural translation occurs between Western rights and Indian

religion, but only at the expense of actual Indian politics since

independence.

By drawing upon this hermeneutic tradition, Goodale de-

ﬁnes human rights in a way that may underemphasize the

well-established anthropological concern with the nation-state

and international institutions. This comes through most

clearly in his discussion of “normative humanism,” an avow-

edly optimistic vision that appears to be directly descended

from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s in its contention that social

collectives are wholly progressive and emancipatory in a state

of nature. The concept is also counterhistorical in that it takes

insufﬁcient note of inequality, imperial conquest, global eco-

nomic integration, and the rise of the nation-state over the

past 500 years.

Goodale’s culturalist vision has much to commend it, but

it needs to be augmented by a historical concern withpolitical

contestation between individuals, social groups, and state and

transnational elites and the role that human rights as social

ideas and as legally enforceable claims play in these struggles.

To complement Goodale’s emphasis on the normative, ethical,

and descriptive, we could add more analytical and political

questions such as what kinds of nation-states commit gen-

ocide. We might also proﬁtably return to Hannah Arendt’s

central question of the origins of totalitarianism. How and

why do political elites mobilize absolutist versions of race,

ethnicity, and the nation, and what is the relationship between

nationalism and violence? How do nation-states deploy ideas

of human rights and the law to depoliticize conﬂict and neu-

tralize social movements, and how might social groups either

resist or acquiesce in their own co-optation?

Charting this political contestation over human rights at

the level of the nation-state and the international human

rights regime also involves examining what Moore (2001, 111)

called the “legal production of political consequences.” Good-

ale rejects the sphere of international law as a legitimate site

of anthropological interest, but it is an area where innovative

and stimulating research is being done by anthropologists of

law including Anders (2005) Clarke (n.d.), Dembour (2004),

and Eltringham (2004).

Ultimately a theory of human rights also has to be theory

of law as well as a theory of inequality and political violence.

506 Current Anthropology Volume 47, Number 3, June 2006

This is especially necessary in that this is precisely what the

international human rights regime itself patently lacks. Of

course, Goodale is right to reject analyses in which human

rights are conceived of in wholly instrumental terms andreally

matter only insofar as they channel the rational interests of

competing groups. Yet that structural constraints are not de-

terminant in all instances does not mean that we can afford

to bracket the inﬂuence of nation-states, a globalized econ-

omy, and a transnational structure of governance. Anthro-

pologists must engage with human rights both as cultural

interpreters and as analysts of a new and emerging area of

political contestation. It is of course possible to pay attention

to the usual concerns of cultural critique as well as to analyze

the operation of the coercive power and disciplinary regimes

of nation-states and intergovernmental bodies, and the most

persuasive and compelling accounts of human rights will in-

tegrate all of these elements.

I must ﬁrst express my appreciation to all of the commen-

tators for taking the time to grapple with my article. It is one

piece of a larger effort on my part to expand the collective

conversation about both the relationship between anthro-

pology and human rights and the ways in which anthropo-

logical forms of knowledge can be used to make potentially

transformative interventions in human rights theory and

practice, interventions that will take place largely outside of

anthropology itself (see Goodale 2006a, 2006b, n.d.; Goodale

and Merry 2006). This effort of mine is, in turn, part of a

movement both within anthropology and outside of it in

which critiques of different parts of the international and

transnational human rights regimes are combined with a

search for new ways of envisioning frameworks for achieving

many of the goals that motivated the postwar emergence of

human rights in the ﬁrst place: a reduction of human suf-

fering, the protection of human dignity, a more just distri-

bution of wealth and resources, the end of neocolonial re-

lations of production, and so on (see, e.g., Baxi 2002;

Rajagopal 2003; Speed 2006). As I have argued more exten-

sively elsewhere (Goodale 2006b), existing anthropological en-

gagements with human rights can be divided into two broad

categories. The ﬁrst, represented by scholar-activists like Terr-

ence Turner and the other founders of what became the Amer-

ican Anthropological Association’s Committee for Human

Rights, emerged from a longer tradition of anthropological

participation in projects for social justice. Here anthropolog-

ical knowledge is mobilized on behalf of speciﬁc groups strug-

gling against speciﬁc forms of marginalization, oppression,and

systemic violence. Beginning in the 1980s, anthropologists

found that human rights discourse had taken on a new and

increasingly more effective currency within these broader

struggles, and they were urged to participate in what Turner

called an “emancipatory cultural politics” (1997) by dem-

onstrating the ways in which cultural difference itself could

be reframed as a human rights issue.

The second category into which anthropological engage-

ments with human rights can be sorted is characterized by

ethnographic studies of human rights practices (see, e.g.,

Merry 2005, 2006; Slyomovics 2005; Wilson 2001). The eth-

nographic turn in the anthropology of human rights is

marked by a certain ambivalence or even skepticism toward

human rights claims and the political and legal processes in

which they are made (Cowan 2006). These studies have shown

contemporary human rights practices to be riddled with con-

tradictions, contingencies, and conceptual Gordian knots.

Nevertheless, these lessons have not been fully taken up by

international lawyers, legal philosophers, or policy makers,

despite the fact—as Riles notes —that certain pockets of crit-

ical academic lawyers (in particular) have been equally vexed

by the dilemmas at the heart of contemporary human rights

discourse.

Although the emancipatory cultural politics and ethno-

graphic approaches to human rights through anthropology

are not irreconcilable, they do reﬂect different epistemological

orientations and, even more important, different understand-

ings of the intersections between anthropology and ethics. A

certain distance is inevitably created when human rights prac-

tices become an object of ethnographic inquiry; likewise, an-

thropologists who are deeply engaged in human rights strug-

gles would ﬁnd the mere study of human rights practices

irrelevant at best, unethical at worst. In other words, although

I have argued that anthropologists should pursue an “ecu-

menical anthropology of human rights” (2006a), in part for

practical reasons, I think it is also important not to ignore

what are often profound differences in the ways in which

anthropologists study, advocate for, and critique human

rights.

A critical anthropology of human rights is, in part, a syn-

thesis of these two approaches. On the one hand, it is meant

to be a framework through which anthropologists can employ

the analytical and methodological tools at their disposal to

intervene in actual social struggles in which human rights are

invoked. On the other hand, it is a theory of normative or-

dering that is derived from the complexities of normative

praxis, in which human rights norms emerge as part of a

broader process that I have described as “ethical theory as

social practice” (2006b). Unlike many ethnographic studies

of human rights, however, a critical anthropology of human

rights is not simply another approach to documenting the

empirical dimensions of human rights practices. Rather, it

uses the ethnography of human rights as the basis for artic-

ulating the grounds on which human rights can be cross-

culturally legitimate without having to resort to the kinds of

abstracted theories of universality that underpin major human

rights instruments and institutions. And unlike the emanci-

Goodale Toward a Critical Anthropology of Human Rights 507

patory cultural politics approach, a critical anthropology of

human rights remains skeptical of the international and trans-

national human rights regimes that have emerged since the

end of cold war, in part because of the way they have been

appropriated by state and corporate actors within the broader

trajectory of late-capitalist consolidation but also for more

philosophical reasons. This skepticism and the critiques that

are derived from it are not, however, the purpose of a critical

anthropology of human rights itself, nor is it the expression

of the kind of “sophistication” that Riles alludes to in her

comment, let alone an example of “self-reﬂexiv[ity]” (again,

Riles) on my part (analytical solipsism is perhaps even less

justiﬁable in the area of human rights than in others because

of the stakes involved). Instead, the critique of human rights

through anthropology—a critique that must be, crucially, an-

chored in the ethnography of human rights practices—is a

means thorough which the idea of human rights can be re-

conceptualized in a way that is neither “relativist” (pace

Dahre) nor “dystopic” (pace Baxi).

This, then, is the basic thrust of my article, which brings

together different arguments in a necessarily rather condensed

form. For example, Eriksen would like to see more “telling

empirical examples” from the literature on anthropology and

human rights, and Likosky and Mooberry quite sensibly ob-

serve that “example[s] of Goodale’s theory at work would

help to clarify [it].” It seemed to me that I would have space

in the article either for a relatively full theoretical exposition

or for a brief development of one or two main ideas embedded

in a discussion of my own ethnographic research and the

research of others but not both. Given these options, I chose

the ﬁrst, but for those who would rather see the idea of a

critical anthropology of human rights explained through eth-

nographic examples such examples are on the way in a book

that I am currently ﬁnishing. There are, however, a number

of critiques across the comments that are not so easily dealt

with. In the space I have left, I will address what I feel are

the most important of these.

Several commentators feel that my discussion of normative

humanism—which is, to reiterate, a way of describing certain

cross-cultural patterns across quite diverse normative prac-

tices—does not take full account of the different forms of

power that act to constrain collectivities from creating rules

for themselves, rules that can include human rights. Wilson,

in particular, argues that this description of normative or-

dering “takes insufﬁcient note of inequality, imperial con-

quest, global economic integration, and the rise of the nation-

state.” Cowan ﬁnds fault from the other direction: she claims

that, instead of failing to take account of the range of external

factors, my description of normative ordering fails to reﬂect

an understanding of the way “endogenous dynamics” impose

constraint from within collectivities. Regarding the external

dimensions of power, I quite clearly say in my article that

“history . . . reads like one long catalogue of different and

insidious constraints—military, ideological, political—on the

capacity of individuals in collectivities to realize themselves

through the production of ideal normative systems.” And

although I quite agree with Wilson that external historical

and political factors will necessarily enter into any political-

analytical intervention within the framework I develop, if legal

anthropology (in particular) has demonstrated anything it is

the enduring richness and persistence of culturally embedded

normativities despite the presence of the kind of large-scale

global processes to which he refers. As for Cowan’s argument

that “it is hardly adequate to reconceptualize power as—in

effect, to reduce power to—‘the presence of constraints’ ” (in

part because such a reconceptualization simpliﬁes local power

dynamics), I can only say that it is not my intention to reduce

power tout court in the way Cowan implies. Rather, I make

it clear that my reconceptualization of “power” is limited to

the speciﬁc dimensions of normative practice that “reﬂect a

balance between the individual and the collective, a balance

that nevertheless can have meaning only in light of local his-

torical and cultural imperatives.”

I had anticipated resistance to my reinterpretation of the

history of anthropology’s relationship with human rights, es-

pecially since much of the anthropological reengagementwith

human rights was accompanied by the construction of a par-

ticular narrative about this history. But as I show in thearticle,

this narrative becomes problematic in light of the archival

reconstruction of the role of the AAA during the writing of

the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the subse-

quent absence of anthropologists during the emergence of the

postwar human rights regime. Nevertheless, I have no interest

in offering my reconstruction of this history as a more “truth-

ful” account than the master narrative of anthropology and

human rights I describe in some detail. Instead, the coun-

ternarrative I propose is used to show that current engage-

ments with human rights are both politically complicatedand

analytically incomplete. In other words, this historical coun-

ternarrative is meant to expand the range of potential an-

thropological contributions to human rights debates—in-

cluding philosophical contributions—in part because the

meanings to be drawn from this history are much more am-

biguous than has been supposed. As for the differences that

remain between me and some of the commentators (especially

Schirmer) on the question of this history, I leave it to others

make their own judgments. But I think the burden of proof

for showing real anthropological inﬂuence on the develop-

ment of human rights theory and practice must remain with

those who assert it, since the impact of this putative inﬂuence

is difﬁcult to ﬁnd in any of the major human rights philos-

ophy, institutional development, and jurisprudence between

1948 and the 1980s. I agree completely with Schirmer that

anthropologists “implicitly addressed issues of rights” (though

she makes this claim without reference to the speciﬁc time

frames that are important for my argument), but this kind

of earnest underground activism hardly qualiﬁes as inﬂuence

on the development of human rights theory and practice in

the way I mean. Yet I must underscore a point I make in the

article: in offering a counternarrative in which anthropology

508 Current Anthropology Volume 47, Number 3, June 2006

and anthropologists were absent from the development of

human rights during this time period, I certainly do not mean

to criticize anthropologists themselves. The intention is ac-

tually quite different: I want to show that potential anthro-

pological contributions to human rights are much broader

and conceivably more transformative than previously

imagined.

I do not have space either to address all of the commen-

tators’ concerns point by point or to acknowledge the en-

couraging signs of agreement from different members of the

group. Yet I cannot end this reply without addressing several

critiques that seem to be based on fundamental misunder-

standings of the article. Although I have learned—and con-

tinue to learn—much from Annelise Rile’s important writings

on the “social production of human rights knowledge,” the

kind of critical anthropology of human rights I envision is

not directed toward the “network” of elite international law-

yers and transnational human rights activists that she has so

thoroughly described and critiqued. Rather, I am concerned

with the much more mundane—and, I would argue, more

potentially signiﬁcant—settings in which human rights dis-

course is taken up by ordinary social actors in the course of

the production of ethical theory as a form of social practice.

And this focus is not theory-driven in the way Riles suggests

but a description of an analytical framework that is itself

derived from the ethnography of human rights practices, a

framework which, moreover, implies a radically different hu-

man rights ontology and grounds for legitimacy. I agree with

Riles that more humility is needed but disagree about what

“humility” means in this context. I would think an approach

to human rights that is based on the assumption that “human

rights knowledge” is tightly circumscribed by the logics and

technocratic imperatives of a tiny group of transnational elites

is rather less humble than one that sees these same elites as

much less consequential than the millions of social actors

whose rough-and-tumble ethical theorizing remains, in the

end, the only means through which the idea of human rights

will ever be legitimately and persuasively expressed.

Finally, there is the suggestion by several commentators

that a critical anthropology of human rights—informed, as

it is, by a historically and discursively deracinatedunderstand-

ing of “humanism” (pace Cowan)—expresses a certain uto-

pianism. If this is true, it is because my own implicithesitation

is the precise opposite of Cowan’s: if she is not willing to cede

1. On this point, Messer introduces some new information that goes

some way toward answering a question that Riles asks in her comment

(and that I avoid trying to answer in my article): why were anthropologists

largely absent from the development of human rights after 1948 Universal

Declaration? Messer argues that the group of international lawyers (she

mentions Philip Alston) that dominated this process consciously mar-

ginalized anthropologists because it was feared that the cultural analysis

they provided would “destroy the very concept of human rights.” This

raises all sorts of intriguing questions. Who were these anthropologists

who were intentionally marginalized? How exactly did this marginali-

zation occur? Were calls not returned, requests to participate in document

drafting turned down?

her tragic and ambiguous reading of human sociality, I am

equally unwilling to ignore what the ethnographic evidence

tells us about the enduring capacity and desire of collectivities

to create rules for themselves that express a basic optimism

and recognition of the fragility of human dignity.

—Mark Goodale

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Direito, descolonização e povos indígenas: contribuições da sociedade civil organizada em tempos de extrativismo socioambiental e epidemia da Covid-19

Chapter

Full-text available

Jul 2021

O artigo discute a relação entre direito e descolonização a partir da experiência concreta da sociedade civil organizada indígena, em especial, da Articulação dos Povos Indígenas do Brasil (APIB) perante o cenário de extrativismo socioambiental, negação dos direitos indígenas pelo Estado brasileiro e o avanço da epidemia da Covid-19 nas terras indígenas em 2020. A noção de descolonização remete à conjunção de estudos teóricos pós-coloniais, giro decolonial e a práxis imbricada na luta e resistência anticolonial de povos que vivem à margem do sistema moderno/colonial. A ideia de descolonizar é baseada no fato de que o regime colonial modificou o mundo e persiste em modificá-lo com seus legados, assumindo conotações e dinâmicas diferentes no debate contemporâneo, que podem ser reveladas e confrontadas por práticas sociais de movimentos de resistência. O direito, por sua vez, é aqui entendido enquanto um mecanismo de opressão, que instrumentaliza a lógica colonizadora e extrativista. Ao mesmo tempo, ainda que estruture o genocídio e paradoxalmente a negação de direitos de povos tradicionais, percebe-se que as disputas dos seus aparatos são mediadas pela consciência crítica dos operadores jurídicos subalternizados e/ou deslocados da lógica moderna/colonial. A utilização de tais instrumentos, dentro das possibilidades da descolonização, ganha relevo quando esse Estado é capaz, ainda que não completamente, de assegurar condições de reprodução dos modos de vida dos povos indígenas e tradicionais. O debate teórico elaborado no artigo, com utilização das noções de pluralismo jurídico e aportes da “indigenização” da crítica jurídica, avança com materiais empíricos, a saber, entrevistas com advogados indígenas da APIB e um estudo de caso dos primeiros andamentos da Ação de Descumprimento de Preceito Fundamental nº 709 (ADPF 709), ação em andamento no Supremo Tribunal Federal (STF), em que a APIB, em conjunto com seis partidos políticos (PSB, PSOL, PCdoB, Rede, PT, PDT), argumentam que há falhas e omissões do governo federal no combate ao coronavírus (Covid-19) nas aldeias indígenas. Dentre outros aspectos, a ação constitucional em tela é uma conquista histórica dos povos indígenas brasileiros, que pela primeira vez apresentaram uma ação no STF através de uma entidade representativa do movimento indígena e tiveram reconhecida a legitimidade jurídica da APIB enquanto organização indígena para propor a ação. Para produção deste artigo, realizou-se revisão bibliográfica a fim de traçar paralelos críticos e analíticos da literatura com ações que envolvem os povos indígenas, assim como pesquisa empírica com a utilização de entrevistas semiestruturadas a advogados indígenas.

Effects of Covid-19 on cultural relativism and state sovereignty

Article

Full-text available

Jun 2023

The COVID-19 pandemic has generally affected the attitudes, behaviors, and lifestyles of people and states. Although there is still no definitive position on the causes of the new species from the coronavirus family, there have been articles and discussions leading to the blaming of Chinese cultural tradition of eating the meat of bats - mammals which were also considered by scientists as potential transmitters of SARS-CoV-2. To measure the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the changing attitudes towards the doctrine of cultural relativism, in anthropological and sociological terms and state sovereignty in political terms, respondents from several Western Balkan countries, such as Kosovo, Albania, Serbia, Northern Macedonia, Montenegro and Bosnia and Herzegovina answered a series of questions. The research findings show that changing the attitudes towards cultural relativism and state sovereignty is significantly dependent on bilateral relations between the Western Balkan nations with Chinese Foreign Policy rather than the COVID-19 pandemic.

Peru: From Otherness to a Shared Diversity

Chapter

Full-text available

Mar 2008

Pablo Sandoval López

Collective memory in the digital age

Chapter

Aug 2022
Progr Brain Res

The digital transformation of our societies particulary driven by information and communication technologies have revolutionized how we generate, communicate, and acquire information. Collective memory as a core and unifying force in our societies has not been an exception among many societal concepts which have been revolutionized through this digital transformation. In this chapter, we have distinguished between “digitalized collective memory” and “collective memory in the digital age”. In addition to discussing these two main concepts, we discuss how digital tools and trace data can open doorways into the study of collective memory that is formed inside and outside of the digital space.

Transforming Mexico: social movements, human rights and social media

Thesis

Full-text available

Mar 2019

Rupert Knox

Mexico’s partial democratic transition resulted in widespread violence, human rights violations, inequality, corruption and impunity, frustrating the hopes and aspirations of many sections of society. However, between 2011 and 2016 three major social movements emerged to challenge injustice and demand social change. The Movement for Peace and Justice with Dignity, YoSoy132 and Ayotzinapa 43 were plural non- institutional social mobilizations empowering those victimised and marginalized in the defective democratic settlement. Human rights discourse and digital and social media have become embedded in political discourse and social practice around the world, but their meaning, uses and implications are complex and contested. This thesis examines their role in contentious collective movements in Mexico’s specific socio-political context. Qualitative case study research methods are used to examine their dynamic uses and meanings in the three mobilization processes in order to explore their enabling and constraining features. The thesis also draws on the author’s previous experience as an international human rights advocate and researcher working on Latin America. The research shows the diverse ways that human rights discourse and digital and social media feature in the practice and meaning of each movement. They are understood to enhance key aspects of civil society mobilization processes, such as strengthening the impact of trigger events and enabling the configuration of skilled support networks, but also to entail certain constraining logics which the movements grapple with to sustain contention. They contribute shaping qualities to the movements but do not monopolise or determine their practices or meaning. These are rooted in the dynamic adaptive approaches of plural actors engaging with their concrete social and political context, creatively using the resources available to mount collective public sphere challenges to the powerholders of Mexico’s partial democracy.

Human Rights

Chapter

Aug 2023

Lea David

Framing Child Rights Within Academic Disciplines

Chapter

Jul 2023

Yvonne Vissing

When we consider how children are framed in the US, we know that history, belief, bias, and experience all matter. When we are not sure what to think, we have been taught to do research and read what scholars have to say. As this pertains to the issue of children’s human rights, scholars are not immune from the dominant cultural biases and narratives pertaining to children.

Changing Paradigms of Human Rights

Chapter

May 2012

Upendra Baxi

This collection of rich, empirically grounded case studies investigates the conditions and consequences of 'juridification' - the use of law by ordinary individuals as a form of protest against 'the state'. Starting from the actual practices of claimants, these case studies address the translation and interpretation of legal norms into local concepts, actions and practices in a way that highlights the social and cultural dynamism and multivocality of communities in their interaction with the law and legal norms. The contributors to this volume challenge the image of homogeneous and primordially norm-bound cultures that has been (unintentionally) perpetuated by some of the more prevalent treatments of law and culture. This volume highlights the heterogeneous geography of law and the ways boundaries between different legal bodies are transcended in struggles for rights. Contributions include case studies from South Africa, Malawi, Sierra Leone, Turkey, India, Papua New Guinea, Suriname, the Marshall Islands and Russia.

RAPPORT FINAL RECHERCHE LSC EVANS (Early release under 'constraint" : an empirical research in four Northern France jurisdictions

Article

Full-text available

Sep 2017

Martine Herzog-Evans

The purpose of this study is to measure the implementation of a 2014 Act creating a McDonaldised "early release under constraint" procedure - i.e. bad fast early release devoid of reentry work or support, this in four Northern France jurisdictions. Cette recherche portait sur la procédure de libération sous contrainte (LSC) de l’article 720 du C. pr. pén. créée par la loi n° 2014-896 du 15 août 2014. L’article 720 représentait la troisième tentative de création d’une procédure écartant le débat contradictoire (DC) en pensant ainsi favoriser le prononcé d’aménagements de peine. Les deux précédentes avaient échoué sur ce point. Notre méthodologie a été « grounded in theory », mais « réaliste », soit élaborée empiriquement dans le cadre de théories éprouvées et visant, de manière ultime, à proposer une nouvelle théorie. Nous avons ainsi proposé une théorie cadre permettant de lier l’ensemble des théories pertinentes. Celles-ci ont emprunté au droit, à la criminologie, aux sciences politiques et sociologiques, à la psychologie, voire parfois à l’économie, à la philosophie ou à la médecine. L’étude a commencé par une analyse juridique de la LSC : procédure et non mesure. Sur le plan empirique, elle a consisté en deux années et demie d’observation des audiences contradictoires (DC) et commissions de l’application des peines (CAP)-LSC, et d’entretiens avec les praticiens et avec des personnes condamnées en sortie de CAP-LSC. Ce travail a été réalisé outre nous-même par vingt-deux étudiants de Master ainsi que d’un doctorant tous formés aux protocoles établis et monitorés. Nous avons également analysé des rapports de CPIP et des jugements et ordonnances de JAP. Une première question a porté sur la réussite ou, au contraire, de l’échec de la mise en œuvre de la procédure de LSC et notamment en nombre d’aménagements de peine. L’analyse des données a été menée grâce aux théories de l’implémentation et celles relatives à la diffusion de l’innovation. L’ensemble des critères mis en lumière par ces théories a permis de comprendre pourquoi la LSC ne pouvait que constituer un échec, ce que nos données locales, ainsi que des données nationales (Delbos, 2016) ont confirmé. Nous avons, en deuxième lieu, observé les situations procédurales (DC, CAP-LSC avec et sans comparution) à l’aune du paradigme LJ-PJ-TJ (légitimité de la justice, justice procédurale, jurisprudence « thérapeutique »), mais aussi des théories de la compliance et de l’autonomie. L’analyse sur ce point a hélas confirmé que les situations de LSC sans comparution et, à un moindre degré, avec comparution offraient un contexte violant fortement – la personnalité du JAP pouvant réduire l’impact nocébo – les principes d’une justice respectueuse et légitime. Les entretiens avec les condamnés ont confirmé la colère qu’ils pouvaient en ressentir. La littérature empirique LJ-PJ-TJ nous enseigne que, plus gravement, la conséquence risque d’en être une très faible compliance, voire une résistance ainsi que de la récidive. La conclusion sur ce point est que le respect procédural est une arme criminologique qu’il est dangereux d’écarter. Enfin, nous nous sommes interrogée sur la question à la fois théorique et pratique de l’accompagnement des sortants de détention et avons questionné le choix d’aménagements de peine obtenus de manière rapide et sans exigence substantielle. Le législateur en pensant « simplifier » les procédures a confondu emballage juridique et contenu : on ne peut faire l’économie d’une préparation de la sortie et d’un projet viable pour les justiciables et pour la société, ni d’un traitement criminologique adapté ; c’est au demeurant le sens des recommandations de l’ONU. Tant les praticiens qui donnent leur avis, que les JAP qui se prononcent, que les condamnés ainsi non accompagnés, rejettent en majorité des processus dénués de contenu. Au surplus, le temps de CPIP serait mieux utilisé à préparer de manière substantielle des projets de sortie plutôt qu’à produire des écrits de manière industrielle. Le cœur de leur métier devrait être le traitement criminologique et multi-partenarial et la transition qualitative avec le monde libre.

Epilogue: The WHO and Religious Actors during the Covid-19 Pandemic

Chapter

Full-text available

Aug 2022

Fabian Winiger

Since the beginning of the World Health Organization, many of its staff members, regional offices, Member States, and directors-general have grappled with the question of what a ‘spiritual dimension’ of health looks like, and how it might enrich the health policies advocated by their organization. Contrary to the widespread perception that ‘spirituality’ is primarily related to palliative care and has emerged relatively recently within the WHO, this book shows that its history is considerably longer and more complex, and has been closely connected to the organization’s ethical aspirations, its quest for more holistic and equitable healthcare, and its struggle with the colonial legacy of international health organizations. Such ideals and struggles silently motivated many of its key actors and policies—such as the provision of universal primary healthcare—which for decades have embodied the organization’s loftiest aspirations. The WHO’s official relationship with ‘spirituality’ advanced in fits, leaps, and setbacks. At times creative and interdisciplinary, at others deeply political, this process was marked by cycles of institutional forgetting and remembering. Rather than a triumph of religious lobbyists, this book argues, the ‘spiritual dimension’ of health may be better understood as a ‘ghost’ that has haunted—and continues to haunt—the WHO as it comes to terms with its mandate of advancing health as a state of ‘complete well-being’ available to all.

Practicing Ethnography in Law: New Dialogues, Enduring Practices

Book

Full-text available

Jul 2002

https://www.amazon.com/Practicing-Ethnography-Law-Dialogues-Enduring/dp/1403960704/ref=sr_1_1_twi_pap_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1483871314&sr=1-1&keywords=practicing+ethnography+in+law

The Guatemalan Military Project: A Violence Called Democracy

Book

Dec 1999

Jennifer Schirmer

The Spoken Word and the Work of Interpretation

Book

Dec 1983

Dennis Tedlock

Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt

Book

Oct 1999

James Ferguson

Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry

Book

Dec 2001

Michael Ignatieff

Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences

Book

Jan 1999

Tuhami: Portrait of a Moroccan

Book

Jan 1980

Vincent Crapanzano

Accounting for Horror: Post-Genocide Debates in Rwanda

Book

Jan 2004

Nigel Eltringham

The 1994 Rwandan genocide was a monumental atrocity in which at least 500,000 Tutsi and tens of thousands of Hutu were murdered in less than four months. Since 1994, members of the Rwandan political class who recognise those events as genocide have struggled to account for it and bring coherence to what is often perceived as irrational, primordial savagery. Most people agree on the factors that contributed to the genocide -- colonialism, ethnicity, the struggle to control the state. However, many still disagree over the way these factors evolved, and the relationship between them. This continuing disagreemnt raises questions about how we come to understand historical events -- understandings that underpin the possibility of sustainable peace. Drawing on extensive research among Rwandese in Rwanda and Europe, and on his work with a conflict resolution NGO in post-genocide Rwanda, Nigel Eltringham argues that conventional modes of historical representation are inadequate in a case like Rwanda. Single, absolutist narratives and representations of genocide actually reinforce the modes of thinking that fuelled the genocide in the first place. Eltringham maintains that if we are to understand the genocide, we must explore the relationship between multiple explanations of what happened and interrogate how -- and why -- different groups within Rwandan society talk about the genocide in different ways. Contents: Preface 1. 'Ethnicity': The Permeant Debate 2. The precursor debate 3. The Holocaust: The comparative debate 4. Debating Collective Guilt 5. Unresolved allegations and the culture of impunity 6. Appealing to the past: The debate over history Afterword

Taking Rights Seriously

Article

Dec 1977
West Polit Q

Yanomami: The Fierce Controversy and What We Can Learn from It

Book

Jan 2005

Yanomami raises questions central to the field of anthropology-questions concerning the practice of fieldwork, the production of knowledge, and anthropology's intellectual and ethical vision of itself. Using the Yanomami controversy-one of anthropology's most famous and explosive imbroglios-as its starting point, this book draws readers into not only reflecting on but refashioning the very heart and soul of the discipline. It is both the most up-to-date and thorough public discussion of the Yanomami controversy available and an innovative and searching assessment of the current state of anthropology. The Yanomami controversy came to public attention through the publication of Patrick Tierney's best-selling book, Darkness in El Dorado, in which he accuses James Neel, a prominent geneticist who belonged to the National Academy of Sciences, as well as Napoleon Chagnon, whose introductory text on the Yanomami is perhaps the best-selling anthropological monograph of all time, of serious human rights violations. This book identifies the ethical dilemmas of the controversy and raises deeper, structural questions about the discipline. A portion of the book is devoted to a unique roundtable in which important scholars on different sides of the issues debate back and forth with each other. This format draws readers into deciding, for themselves, where they stand on the controversy's-and many of anthropology's-central concerns. All of the royalties from this book will be donated to helping the Yanomami improve their healthcare.

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