Human Rights (Anthropology)

Introduction

Once considered a topic that held little interest for cultural anthropologists, human rights became a focus of growing anthropological concern over the 1990s and 2000s. Important publications now number in the hundreds, even when limited (as this article is) only to works by cultural anthropologists (and not forensic anthropologists), which directly reference human rights (and not works that are relevant but make no more than a passing mention of human rights). As Annelise Riles aptly summarizes in her article “Anthropology, Human Rights, and Legal Knowledge: Culture in the Iron Cage” (Riles 2006, p. 53, cited under International Legal Epistemology), anthropologists have turned “from treating human rights doctrines, actors, and institutions as instruments to be used (e.g., as a tool of advocacy on behalf of indigenous peoples) to treating them as subjects of ethnographic research, on par with other ethnographic subjects.” What was a discussion of anthropology and human rights has thus evolved into a research subfield, the anthropology of human rights, offering field research–based examinations of place- and time-specific encounters among the promoters of human rights universalism (a term coined by Mark Goodale in Goodale 2009, cited under General Overviews) and diverse communities of sufferers of human-inflicted harms. Whether current scholarship in anthropology focuses on human rights as practice or as discourse, its common signature is to foreground the local, national, and international political and economic processes in which human rights and larger social justice projects are embedded. Two publications that appeared in 1997 marked a watershed in the development of new modes of anthropological engagement with human rights. One, the contributory volume edited by Richard Wilson, Human Rights, Culture and Context (Wilson 1997, cited under General Overviews), anticipated research and writing relating to both the practice and discourse of human rights. The other, a Journal of Anthropological Research special issue on Human Rights, edited by Carole Nagengast and Terence Turner, articulated a new view of culture’s relationship to human rights, not as an argument against ethical universals but an argument for the embeddedness of ethics within any human group’s encompassing way of life (see Hatch 1997, Messer 1997, and Nagengast 1997, all cited under Pros and Cons of Cultural Relativism; and Turner 1997, cited under Cultural Rights). Even if the year 1997 seems an arbitrary dividing line between the eras of “anthropology and human rights” and the “anthropology of human rights,” there is nonetheless a disciplinary consensus that anthropology’s engagement with human rights has undergone significant changes in its guiding concerns, approaches, orientations, and commitments.

General Overviews

Anthropology’s encounter with human rights is not, and never has been, one thing, a consensus, but is rather a thing of two sides, or even a multiplicity of approaches. Anthropology has been torn between analytic and critical dispositions toward human rights and divided about what substantive matters matter most, even as convergence around theory and method has been discernible since the late 1990s. Therefore, no single overview may capture the diversity of the subfield, even as a reading of several overviews can be of benefit to both newcomer and specialist. In an update of the author’s Annual Review of Anthropology article of 1993, Messer 2009 mentions many works that make no reference to “human rights” proper but which are held to demonstrate the relevance of cultural anthropological research to more than one pressing human rights issue. Goodale 2006 and Goodale 2009 offer a broadly sweeping historical vision of the changing context of anthropology as a guide to the discipline’s changing approaches to human rights. Goodale 2007 usefully sums up the object of study of the anthropology of human rights with one word, “practice.” For Goodale, “The practice of human rights describes all of the many ways in which social actors across the range talk about, advocate for, criticize, study, legally enact, vernacularize, and so on, the idea of human rights in its various forms” (p. 24). Merry 2006 has the comprehensive scope proper to a review article but focuses fairly narrowly on anthropological contributions to the study of international law. Wilson 1997, Wilson 2007, and Wilson 2006, though modestly framed, as an “Introduction,” “Conclusion,” and “Afterword” to separate contributory volumes and a journal special section, stand out for the clarity with which links are pointed out between anthropology and the multidisciplinary field of human rights studies. The ensemble of these overviews will help the reader grasp how anthropological approaches tend to bundle rather than disaggregate fundamental dichotomies more often kept separate in legal scholarship, philosophy, and political science, such as those between human rights as limits to state power and as entitlements (things necessary for a person to have a life of dignity), and between “human rights law” and “human rights talk,” where the “former refers to the positivised rules in national or international law and the latter refers to how people speak about those norms, or aspire to expand or interpret them in new ways” (Wilson 2007, p. 350).

Goodale, Mark. 2006. Toward a critical anthropology of human rights. Current Anthropology 47.3: 485–511.
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Covers crucial historical background and case studies in making a case in favor of a “critical” anthropology, a stance in which anthropology neither repudiates nor is subservient to human rights but “self-consciously creates space between itself and ideas and practices that have become coextensive with or, in fact, constitute the experience of everyday life” (p. 491).
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Goodale, Mark. 2007. Locating rights, envisioning law between the global and the local. In The practice of human rights: Tracking law between the global and the local. Edited by Mark Goodale and Sally Engle Merry, 1–38. Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge Univ. Press.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511819193.001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
With some overlap in themes with Goodale 2006, this introduction defines four themes in anthropological studies of the practice of human rights: “states of violence,” “registers of power,” “conditions of vulnerability,” and “ambivalence.”
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Goodale, Mark. 2009. Surrendering to utopia: An anthropology of human rights. Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press.
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Less a review of the field than a set of theoretically sophisticated and erudite thought pieces, arguing that part of cultural anthropology’s distinctive relevance to human rights is as a response to diverse challenges to human safety, rights, and dignity arising from neoliberalism.
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Merry, Sally Engle. 2006. Anthropology and international law. Annual Review of Anthropology 35:99–116.
DOI: 10.1146/annurev.anthro.35.081705.123245Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
An authoritative overview of political and legal anthropological approaches to human rights as international law.
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Messer, Ellen. 2009. Anthropology, human rights, and social transformation. In Human rights: An anthropological reader. Edited by Mark Goodale, 104–135. Chichester, UK, and Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.
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In arguing against the conventional wisdom that anthropologists have been uninvolved in human rights formulations, Messer presents an encompassing vision of what aspects of human rights are relevant in cultural anthropology, summarizing findings of ethnographic research on themes of cultural relativism, indigenous rights, gender and economic inequality, and state and legal systems.
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Wilson, Richard Ashby. 2006. Afterword to “Anthropology and human rights in a new key”: The social life of human rights. American Anthropologist 108.1: 77–83.
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Something of a critique of critical excesses, this essay caps an influential 2006 journal special section on human rights with consideration of the “internal complexity of human rights,” “ethnographies of human rights practices,” “legal anthropology, legal realism, and knowledge,” and “anthropology, analysis, and activism.”
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Wilson, Richard Ashby. 2007. Tyrannosaurus lex: The anthropology of human rights and transnational law. In The practice of human rights: Tracking law between the global and the local. Edited by Mark Goodale and Sally Engle Merry, 342–368. Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge Univ. Press.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511819193Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Political/legal anthropological research on human rights is categorized according to its contributions to understanding four “processes” of law and rights: the pursuit of rights through legal means; appeals made by local actors for international involvement; the adoption of human rights concepts into local vernaculars; and critical perspectives on legal epistemology.
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Wilson, Richard Ashby, ed. 1997. Human rights, culture and context: Anthropological perspectives. London: Pluto.
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A contributory volume widely credited for setting the agenda for the anthropological study of human rights as both a discourse and a form of social practice.
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Pros and Cons of Cultural Relativism

In the pre-1997 era of anthropology and human rights, much attention, from within as well as without the anthropological discipline, gravitated toward debate about what anthropology’s adherence to cultural relativism meant for the discipline’s posture vis-à-vis human rights. Far from the unmitigated defense of tolerance that non-anthropologists associate with the doctrine of cultural relativism (and by implication with anthropology), nearly all anthropological formulations of relativism’s relevance for human rights have denounced the concept’s use as a justification for injustices, and hence argued for recognizing limits to its ethical reach. Messer 1993 contextualized cultural relativism’s importance to the anthropology of the time: even as searching for statements on cultural relativism remained for many years perhaps the only reason why an international human rights lawyer might open an anthropological journal, the relativism controversy per se was in no way disabling to anthropologists who wished to pursue activism organized around concepts of indigenous rights and global inequality. Renteln 1988 usefully distinguishes the various forms of relativism (linguistic, ethical, cultural, epistemological) sometimes confused in this debate. Hatch 1997 picks up one variety of relativism to which Renteln gives little attention, methodological relativism, and argues that this stands at the core of what cultural relativism means to anthropology: Hatch holds cultural relativism to be at base not a proscription against judgment but a mental and methodological discipline of suspending judgment (in the interest of being more accurate observers of what is). Nagengast 1997, friendly to universalism, and Cohen 1989, skeptical of it, point to ethical pitfalls in both universalism and relativism, and hence coincide in arguing for a middle ground between them. Preis 1996 turns the critical lens around to read the controversy surrounding cultural relativism as a symptom of international human rights theorists’ greater comfort with abstract categories of humans than with specific social beings. The view of Messer 1997 of the human rights domain as culturally plural coincides with that of Fluehr-Lobban 1995 in positing that a growing acceptance of the universal nature of some human rights was already spreading across the planet.

Cohen, Ronald. 1989. Human rights and cultural relativism: The need for a new approach. American Anthropologist 91.4: 1014–1017.
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Pointing to anthropologists’ relative exclusion from debates surrounding the expansive concept of human rights proposed by the African Charter (including the right to a more equitable world order), Cohen asserts the need for anthropologists to conduct more human rights research and develop a stronger policy voice.
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Fluehr-Lobban, Carolyn. 1995. Cultural relativism and human rights. The Chronicle of Higher Education 41.39: B1–B2.
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An argument against cultural relativism on the grounds that it impedes not just greater acceptance for human rights but also a more constructive role for anthropologists in the international human rights community.
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Hatch, Elvin. 1997. The good side of relativism. In Special issue: Universal human rights versus cultural relativity. Edited by Carole Nagengast and Terence Turner. Journal of Anthropological Research 53.3: 371–381.
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Argues that the tolerance that relativism called for should constitute anthropologists’ default mode of thought; thus, anthropologists should be slow to make moral judgments while not being ethically barred from judging.
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Messer, Ellen. 1993. Anthropology and human rights. Annual Review of Anthropology 22:221–249.
DOI: 10.1146/annurev.an.22.100193.001253Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Situates the controversy surrounding cultural relativism and human rights within a broader range of human rights–relevant anthropological research.
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Messer, Ellen. 1997. Pluralist approaches to human rights. In Special issue: Universal human rights versus cultural relativity. Edited by Carole Nagengast and Terence Turner. Journal of Anthropological Research 53.3: 293–317.
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Traces four major sources of modern human rights (Western political liberalism, socialism and social welfare principles, cross-cultural rights traditions, and the UN instruments), seeking points of agreement. On this basis, Messer argues for a pluralist approach to human rights (as an overlapping consensus rather than a perfect unity of principle).
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Nagengast, Carole. 1997. Women, minorities, and indigenous peoples: Universalism and cultural relativity. In Special issue: Universal human rights versus cultural relativity. Edited by Carole Nagengast and Terence Turner. Journal of Anthropological Research 53.3: 349–369.
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A critique of cultural relativism as deployed to excuse, rationalize, or explain differential treatment before the law of women, minorities, and indigenous groups. Makes an argument for a partial universalism.
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Preis, Ann-Belinda S. 1996. Human rights as cultural practice: An anthropological critique. Human Rights Quarterly 18.2: 286–315.
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Argues that a paradigmatic shift is needed in anthropology’s and international human rights’ concept of culture, integrating the insights of 1980s and 1990s post-structuralist analyses and eschewing determinist and linear views of social change.
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Renteln, Alison Dundes. 1988. Relativism and the search for human rights. American Anthropologist 90.1: 56–72.
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Argues that the central insight of relativism is enculturation and not tolerance. As a metaethical theory about the nature of moral perceptions, relativism logically permits moral criticism and is compatible with cross-cultural universals. Proposes the cross-cultural comparative search for universals as a way in which anthropology should resolve categorical ambiguities and find global support for particular human rights.
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The 1947 AAA Statement on Human Rights

In 1947 the eminent cultural anthropologist Melville Herskovits was approached by UNESCO for commentary on the idea of an international declaration of human rights. After Herskovits circulated his draft commentary among members of the American Anthropological Association’s Executive Board, it was decided that the commentary would be published in American Anthropologist, with minor modifications added by board members, as an official AAA Statement (American Anthropological Association 1947). Washburn 1987 and Engle 2001 construe the 1947 “Statement on Human Rights” as something of an embarrassment for American anthropologists, not so much for what the Statement itself says as for the way in which it became an emblem for anthropology’s identification with cultural relativism, and by extension with categorical rejection of human rights. It is perhaps sooner the case that the Statement was ignored by anthropologists in the years immediately following, simply because they did not have much use for either the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) or the concept of human rights more generally. Steward 1948 and Barnett 1948, in the only two responses to the Statement to be published in American Anthropologist, take differing positions on whether the Executive Board should even have pronounced on a nonscientific matter, but they coincide in arguing that anthropologists should avoid social policy advocacy. Bennett 1949 disagrees, asserting it to be unsatisfactory and perhaps impossible for anthropologists to resolve dilemmas of social participation simply “by withdrawing from the scene and adhering to science” (p. 330). Goodale 2006 presents a cogent argument for revalidating the AAA Statement on the grounds that it, as well as the UDHR, should be read as products of the times: the Statement reflected skepticism about Western beneficence emerging from destructive colonial legacies and decolonization struggles across Africa and Asia, while the UDHR displayed the post-Holocaust/World War II determination never again to permit ethnic and religious intolerance to create upheavals in world politics.

American Anthropological Association. 1947. Statement on human rights. American Anthropologist 49.4: 539–543.
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Observes, “The history of the expansion of the western world has been marked by the demoralization of human personality and the disintegration of human rights among the peoples over whom hegemony has been established” (p. 541), and asserts that “the rights of Man in the Twentieth Century cannot be circumscribed by the standards of any single culture” (p. 542).
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Barnett, H. G. 1948. On science and human rights. American Anthropologist 50.2: 352–355.
DOI: 10.1525/aa.1948.50.2.02a00240Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Rejects the idea that anthropologists have anything to say about moral principles, being obligated as scientists to restrict their purview to what is and resist pronouncing on what should be.
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Bennett, John W. 1949. Science and human rights: Reason and action. American Anthropologist 51.2: 329–336.
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A defense of the idea that anthropologists should seek a voice in public policy, as opposed to the arguments put forward in Steward 1948 and Barnett 1948.
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Engle, Karen. 2001. From skepticism to embrace: Human rights and the American Anthropological Association from 1947–1999. Human Rights Quarterly 23.3: 536–559.
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Questions whether the differences between the 1947 AAA Statement and the 1999 AAA Declaration on Human Rights truly add up to a 180-degree turnabout on cultural relativism, as some anthropologists think.
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Goodale, Mark. 2006. Ethical theory as social practice. American Anthropologist 108.1: 25–37.
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In making an argument that ethnographic studies of human rights practices can be used as the basis for making innovative claims within human rights debates outside of anthropology itself, this essay puts forward the possibility of developing an anthropological philosophy of human rights, grounding this in a longer history of anthropological skepticism toward universalism.
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Steward, Julian H. 1948. Brief communications. American Anthropologist 50.2: 351–352.
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Points to language in the Statement that appears to create an exception for tolerance around oppressive systems of government, as in Nazi Germany, and argues that the Statement, in drawing such an exception to relativism, creates a dilemma for anthropologists as to whether “we tolerate everything, and keep hands off, or we fight intolerance and conquest” (p. 352).
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Washburn, Wilcomb E. 1987. Cultural relativism, human rights, and the AAA. American Anthropologist 89.4: 939–943.
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A defense of cultural relativism qualified by a call for anthropologists to adopt a more sophisticated cultural politics no longer organized around the reflex to identify with other societies and question the West.
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Cross-Cultural Equivalents for Human Rights

In the pre-1997 era of “anthropology and human rights” (prior to the emergence of a research-based anthropology of human rights), the cross-cultural comparative agenda stood a world apart from coexisting anthropological agenda built around international political economy or indigenous rights. If the latter two point insistently toward issues of global inequality and colonialism, “culture” is the whole that the comparativist scholarship implicitly references as the context for understanding convergence and divergence in concepts of justice and injustice, albeit in a way that virtually extracts culture from material relations and equates it with language or cognition. In approaching “cultures” as analytically isolable units and matters “in the head,” and taking it for granted that the ethnographic record was an accurate and workably complete compendium of information on human philosophical and political institutions, the cognitive anthropological approach behind the cross-cultural comparative agenda evinced a comfort with methodological and theoretical conventions that political economic anthropologists and advocates for indigenous rights rejected in favor of an agenda of linking the subjective formulations of experience of global peripheral groups with histories of colonial conquest and unequal North-South exchange. The ethnological study of human justice concepts by Alison Dundes Renteln was clearly the field-shaping project of the comparativist agenda. For Renteln, the central question posed by cultural relativism “is whether or not there is any comparable notion, or what has been called the homeomorphic equivalent, for human rights in other societies” (Renteln 1990, p. 88). Renteln takes the principle of proportional retribution—of which, lex talionis (“an eye for an eye”) is only one example cross-culturally—as the author’s test case “to demonstrate acceptance of a moral principle . . . by all cultures” (p. 135). Handwerker 1997 extends that search for human rights equivalents to encompass inarticulate emotion, and not just explicit moral concepts, by seeking evidence that humans across boundaries of culture have a common experience of events of kindness or violence, this common experience for him being grounds for a human right to live in freedom from violence. The charged political valence of the line between cognitive and political economic anthropological perceptions of social justice agenda was confirmed through the exchange between Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Roy D’Andrade in the pages of Current Anthropology (see Scheper-Hughes 1995 and D’Andrade 1995): the call by Scheper-Hughes for politically engaged anthropologists to march under the banner of human rights was dismissed by D’Andrade as hopelessly politicized and good only for confirming the researcher’s preconceived ideas, and Scheper-Hughes wondered what, other than a self-proclaimed scientificity, made D’Andrade’s approach immune from similar disqualification for being “political.”

D’Andrade, Roy. 1995. Moral models in anthropology. Current Anthropology 36.3: 399–408.
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“Moral models,” which give emphasis to evidence of oppression, demystification, and denunciation, are rejected as a weaker basis for moral authority for anthropology than “objective understanding of the world.”
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Handwerker, W. Penn. 1997. Universal human rights and the problem of unbounded cultural meanings. American Anthropologist 99.4: 799–809.
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On the basis of survey evidence that people who live dramatically different lives—on tourist islands in the West Indies or as hunter-gatherers and reindeer herders in Arctic regions—agree about components that make up a unitary phenomenon legitimately called “violence,” it is argued that freedom from violence stands as an important candidate for a universal human right.
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Renteln, Alison Dundes. 1990. International human rights: Universalism versus relativism. Newbury Park, CA: SAGE.
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The essential reading setting forth the cross-cultural comparative study of human rights as a search for homeomorphic equivalents for human rights in other societies. Valuable discussions of the social nature of human rights and of relativism’s several varieties precede an evidence-based analysis of the cross-cultural prevalence and content of the principle of proportional retribution.
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Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. 1995. The primacy of the ethical: Propositions for a militant anthropology. Current Anthropology 36.3: 409–440.
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Argues that cultural relativism, understood as moral relativism, is “no longer appropriate to the world in which we live,” and forwards the claim that anthropology must be politically committed and morally engaged if “it is to be worth anything at all” (p. 409).
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Indigenous Rights

Anthropology’s greatest impact on debates within the international human rights community has been felt through anthropologists’ arguments for the recognition of cultural and collective rights under the rubric of indigenous rights. Limitations on this article’s reach are particularly evident in relation to this topic: yet another of over one hundred citations could be envisioned dealing just with anthropological contributions to questions of indigenous rights. Under what circumstances and in relation to what rights groups are to be deemed possessors of rights and duties are questions with which the international human rights community is still grappling. Whether they concern theory, jurisprudence, or activist strategy, debates and deliberations concerning the human rights of indigenous groups persistently turn to questions of collective rights and how to balance and reconcile these with the rights of the individual. No seamless reconciliation may be possible between collective rights and conventional ways of thinking of human rights as protections of the dignity of the individual. Indigenous rights may therefore end up being not just the earliest but also the most enduring controversy through which anthropologists engage with human rights. Bodley 2008 (the fifth edition of a work first published in 1975) was an influential summary of the cultural anthropological case in favor of indigenous autonomy globally. Papers in Mascia-Lees and Lees 2003 highlight the enduring centrality of language retention and revitalization to indigenous rights. Conklin 1997 is an early reflection on the power of exotic body images as instruments for gaining the sympathy of Western audiences. Speed, et al. 2009; Stephen 1999; and Warren 1998 index the multiplicity of forms and venues through which indigenous identity is defined by state agents and contested by indigenous subjects of state power. Turner 1995 and Speed 2007 provide viewpoints on the interface between local-level politics and external supporters among indigenous groups facing intrusions on security, territory, and sovereignty at the hands of external political, legal, and commercial agents.

Bodley, John H. 2008. Victims of progress. 5th ed. Lanham, MD: AltaMira.
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A thorough, comprehensive view of the effects of Western global expansion on local, indigenous, autonomous peoples around the world. Clearly and succinctly summarizes two and a half centuries of colonial and imperial expansion, tells stories of the people who resisted and continue to resist that expansion, and provides evidence of the negative consequences of being incorporated into large nation-states.
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Conklin, Beth A. 1997. Body paint, feathers, and VCRs: Aesthetics and authenticity in Amazonian activism. American Ethnologist 24.4: 711–737.
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A critical reflection on the centrality of exotic body images in defining cultural authenticity for Western audiences. In relation to Amazonian Indian activism in Brazil, indigenous images constructed in relation to Western concepts of primitivism, exoticism, and authenticity prove to be strategically effective political tools but impose symbolic limitations of their own on the pursuit of indigenous goals of self-determination.
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Mascia-Lees, Frances E., and Susan H. Lees, eds. 2003. Special issue: In focus—Language ideologies, rights, and choices: Dilemmas and paradoxes of loss, retention, and revitalization. American Anthropologist 105.4: 710–781.
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Papers examine the cultural politics of indigenous language survival and language rights, in relation to orthographies, teaching, court translation, intergenerational change, family dynamics, state ideology, and identity in the era of globalization.
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Speed, Shannon. 2007. Exercising rights and reconfiguring resistance in the Zapatista Juntas De Buen Gobierno. In The practice of human rights: Tracking law between the global and the local. Edited by Mark Goodale and Sally Engle Merry, 163–192. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
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With a focus on the formation of “Good Governance Councils” among Zapatista rebel communities in Chiapas, Mexico, Speed makes an argument for the power of community base group–anchored social movements to shape human rights discourses at the national and international levels.
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Speed, Shannon, Maylei Blackwell, Rosalva Aída Hernández Castillo, et al. 2009. Remapping gender, justice, and rights in the indigenous Americas: Toward a comparative analysis and collaborative methodology. Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology 14.2: 300–331.
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Report on a collaborative grant bringing together US-, Mexican-, and Guatemalan-based scholars to compare experiences of indigenous groups in the three countries in the face of economic, political, legal, and cultural globalization. Particular attention is given to shifting gender norms and dynamics in this context.
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Stephen, Lynn. 1999. The construction of indigenous suspects: Militarization and the gendered and ethnic dynamics of human rights abuses in southern Mexico. American Ethnologist 26.4: 822–842.
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Gendered and ethnic patterns of militarization and torture in southern Mexico are examined as ways of constructing the indigenous identity of criminal suspects in relation to national myth and vision. Tacit culturalist official rationales for treating some people differently than others stand revealed as a dynamic that creates unequal vulnerability to political violence and human rights abuses.
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Turner, Terence. 1995. An indigenous people’s struggle for socially equitable and ecologically sustainable production: The Kayapo revolt against extractivism. Journal of Latin American Anthropology 1.1: 98–121.
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Describes and analyzes events of late 1994, when Kayapo communities joined in revolt as young adult male age cohort groups gained the support of the Federal Police in expelling miners and loggers from their areas. Features of internal Kayapo social and political dynamics stand in relief via the communities’ interface with nonindigenous political and economic forces.
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Warren, Kay B. 1998. Indigenous movements and their critics: Pan-Maya activism in Guatemala. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.
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Focusing on the years of Guatemala’s peace process (1987 through 1996), this ethnographic account of Pan-Mayan cultural activism gives rich inclusion to the voices, writings, and actions of its participants. Challenging the belief that indigenous movements emerge as isolated, politically unified fronts, Warren shows that Pan-Mayanism reflects diverse local, national, and international influences.
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Cultural Rights

The idea of cultural rights stands out from the indigenous rights politics and collective rights concepts of which it is part through its assertion that cultural difference is itself a human right, potentially subject to international legal formulation and protection. Cultural difference is thereby redefined not in terms of a rejection of universal rights but as a right unto itself, a position entirely distinct from the cultural rights, to scientific knowledge and what some might call “high culture,” asserted by the UN International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights. Cultural rights thus conceived stands at the heart of the American Anthropological Association’s 1999 Declaration on Anthropology and Human Rights, which sought to pivot anthropology away from a position of tolerating the seemingly intolerable in the name of culture, while still preserving the discipline’s metatheoretical commitment to context. Turner 1993 and Turner 1997 start from a concept of indigenous rights to make a case for cultural rights, thought of as the right to be different. Papers in Cowan, et al. 2001 do not necessarily endorse cultural rights, but they contribute to the overarching case that before we can talk about cultural rights, we should have some agreement on what “culture” is; among anthropologists, culture is not an easily definable, thing-like possession, but rather the most encompassing context for the individual’s realization of rights. Povinelli 2002 raises questions about whether Australian Aboriginal culture can even be approached as a taken-for-granted construct or must sooner be understood as an ever-evolving product of interactions between Australia’s political elite, promoters and detractors of Aboriginal culture in the arts, social research, and the media, and representatives of Aboriginal organizations and communities. Through their focus on rights mobilizations in the Mayan region, the essays in Pitarch, et al. 2008 provide a remarkably deep political, economic, and global contextualization for cultural rights claims. Jackson 2007 similarly proposes that differing histories are keys to understanding differences in the ways in which “culture” is framed by campaigns supporting civil and political rights on one hand and indigenous rights mobilizations on the other. Speed and Sierra 2005, a special issue of PoLAR (Political and Legal Anthropology Review), raises questions regarding where and whether boundaries can be drawn in human rights debates between concepts of “culture,” “politics,” “economics,” and “gender,” presenting Latin American case studies set in regions deeply affected by neoliberal political and economic reform. Strathern 2004, an essay that might be taken as a call for anthropologists not to close the book prematurely on relativist varieties of skepticism, asserts that “only the particularity of circumstances would define what an entitlement or right might mean in those specific conditions under which people live” (p. 232).

Cowan, Jane K., Marie-Bénédicte Dembour, and Richard Wilson, eds. 2001. Culture and rights: Anthropological perspectives. Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge Univ. Press.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511804687Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
In this contributory volume, leading anthropologists attempt to go beyond the traditional terms of the universalism versus cultural relativism debate. Through reference to concrete realities in the lives of people from around the world (Hawaii, France, Thailand, Botswana, Greece, Nepal, and Canada), they explore the overlap of cultural difference and objectifications of culture with rights talk and rights institutions.
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Jackson, Jean. 2007. Rights to indigenous culture in Colombia. In The practice of human rights: Tracking law between the global and the local. Edited by Mark Goodale and Sally Engle Merry, 204–241. Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge Univ. Press.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511819193Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Examines three cases from indigenous Colombia to highlight relationships between individual and collective rights.
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Pitarch Ramón Pedro, Shannon Speed, and Xochitl Leyva Solano, eds. 2008. Human rights in the Maya region: Global politics, cultural contentions, and moral engagements. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press.
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A collection of essays on Mayan human rights mobilizations, the effects of truth-finding and documentation, human rights translation, and the limitations of human rights frameworks.
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Povinelli, Elizabeth A. 2002. The cunning of recognition: Indigenous alterities and the making of Australian multiculturalism. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press.
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Makes the argument that what Australian Aboriginal “indigenous culture” is cannot be taken for granted but is an ever-evolving product of interactions between political elites, leaders in the arts, social research and the media, and Aboriginal representatives.
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Speed, Shannon, and María Teresa Sierra, eds. 2005. Special Issue: Symposium: Critical perspectives on human rights and multiculturalism in neoliberal Latin America. PoLAR 28.1:1–150.
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Journal special issue devoted to new challenges posed to cultural and indigenous rights activism by neoliberal reform.
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Strathern, Marilyn. 2004. Losing (out on) intellectual resources. In Law, anthropology, and the constitution of the social: Making persons and things. Edited by Alain Pottage and Martha Mundy, 201–233. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511493751Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A reanalysis of the “Compo girl case” from Papua New Guinea, in which a compensation payment including the giving of a bride was deemed unconstitutional by a national court after a case was brought by a national human rights NGO.
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Turner, Terence. 1993. Anthropology and multiculturalism: What is anthropology that multiculturalists should be mindful of it? Cultural Anthropology 8.4: 411–429.
DOI: 10.1525/can.1993.8.4.02a00010Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Advocates a “critical multiculturalism” that, by contrast with identity politics, incorporates the possibility of internal dissent and change over time.
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Turner, Terence. 1997. Human rights, human difference: Anthropology’s contribution to an emancipatory cultural politics. In Special issue: Universal human rights versus cultural relativity. Edited by Carole Nagengast and Terence Turner. Journal of Anthropological Research 53.3: 273–291.
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Posits a universal right to difference, which fits with transformations in human rights in the context of the contemporary crisis of the state and the rise of ethnic and identity politics.
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Political-Economic Approaches

In the pre-1997 era of “anthropology and human rights” (prior to the emergence of a research-based anthropology of human rights), it seemed to students of political economy to be neither accurate nor adequate to describe human rights crises, or the lives of non-Western people more generally, through methods, concepts, and units of analysis that pretended to analyze “cultures” as isolates. An early and influential work of ethnographic human rights denunciation was Nash 1979. In this work, Nash takes classically anthropological esoterica, Bolivian tin miners’ sacrificial offerings to Tío, the mine god or devil, but then situates these rituals in a theoretically innovative way within a context of unresolved past injustices and continuing harsh exploitation and global inequality. Seen against the backdrop of an international political-economic explanatory context, non-Westerners’ beliefs and rituals do not confirm ethical and cultural distance so much as show the near opposite, their connectedness to the Western world via currents of world history and global capitalism. Based in part on a rereading of Nash 1979, Taussig 1980 embellishes the theme that non-Western spiritual beliefs and practices may constitute a latent critique of capitalism. Nash 2001 updates the concern with material inequality and economic rights to include consideration of the Zapatista uprising and the growing role of NGOs and diverse other external allies in human rights mobilizations in Chiapas, Mexico. Binford 1996 is a far-reaching contextualization of the wartime massacre at El Mozote, El Salvador, within the history and sociology of that country’s class divisions. Farmer 1992 and Farmer 2003 formulate a widely influential human rights framing of global health disparities as a form of “structural violence.” Archambault 2011 examines contradictions between the political ecology of climate change and a human rights imaginary that situates wrong in “traditional” African societies as a product of culture.

Archambault, Caroline S. 2011. Ethnographic empathy and the social context of rights: “Rescuing” Maasai girls from early marriage. American Anthropologist 113.4: 632–643.
DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1433.2011.01375.xSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Early marriage is explained not as a relic of tradition and malicious patriarchy, but rather as a contemporary adaptation to livelihood insecurity. It is argued that prevailing concepts of “tradition,” “culture,” “victimhood,” and “collective rights” in human rights theory obscure important structural factors and deflect attention from effective policy initiatives.
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Binford, Leigh. 1996. The El Mozote massacre: Anthropology and human rights. Tucson: Univ. of Arizona Press.
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Examines the largest massacre of civilians during the Salvadoran civil war in the context of the history of the residents of the village of El Mozote.
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Farmer, Paul. 1992. AIDS and accusation: Haiti and the geography of blame. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.
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Weaves together description and analysis on three distinct levels—village-level ethnography, international political economy, and the narrative construction of reality—as a way of explaining how responsibility for a new disease epidemic was constituted as blame and then shifted onto vulnerable populations.
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Farmer, Paul. 2003. Pathologies of power: Health, human rights, and the new war on the poor. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.
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Through first-person accounts drawn from the author’s visits to Russian prisons and villages in Haiti and Chiapas, Mexico, Farmer exposes relationships between avoidable illnesses and political and economic injustice.
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Nash, June C. 1979. We eat the mines and the mines eat us: Dependency and exploitation in Bolivian tin mines. New York: Columbia Univ. Press.
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Both a community study and a work of world-systems analysis, this ethnographic monograph lays bare the suffering and oppression endured by a Bolivian tin-mining community, displays the links between the miners’ harsh exploitation and unresolved histories of colonial domination and global inequality, and describes and analyzes the miners’ own, spiritually informed understandings.
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Nash, June C. 2001. Mayan visions: The quest for autonomy in an age of globalization. New York: Routledge.
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Drawing perspective from a career-long study of worker and peasant activism in the Americas, Nash argues that the Zapatista rebellion has energized new efforts combining grassroots and global activism for justice, rights, and viable livelihoods involving a confluence of indigenous, grassroots, and national and global civil society activists in Chiapas.
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Taussig, Michael T. 1980. The devil and commodity fetishism in South America. Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press.
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Based on the author’s own fieldwork among peasants and sugarcane workers in the Cauca Valley, Colombia, as well as a rereading of Nash 1979, capitalism is deconstructed as a form of western European “local knowledge” by throwing it into relief with indigenous notions regarding the flows of wealth, labor, and, ultimately, power.
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North-South Human Rights Knowledge Exchange

The development of the anthropology of human rights from the 1990s onward is indissociable not only from the global spread of human rights concepts and practices, but also from the growth and maturation of the interdisciplinary field of human rights studies. If a first generation of human rights scholarship focused on the formulation of norms and standards and engaged in basic debates about what constitutes “rights,” the second generation of human rights studies moved forward to examine how actors in the international human rights regime motivate both powerful core states and human rights violators among states and business corporations to act in greater accord with international legal norms. Yet it is only with the third wave of human rights studies, in which the study of the international human rights regime shifts in focus from top to bottom in aiming to understand how diverse social movements all find value in the common idioms and procedures of human rights, in which cultural anthropology comes fully into its own as a contributor to human rights studies. The agenda and meta-method proposed by Merry 2006a—“mapping the middle”—has been influential. The “middle,” according to Merry, is that interstitial space in the international human rights regime, peopled by human rights knowledge brokers who introduce neophytes to vernacularized forms of human rights concepts while in turn encapsulating digestible doses of local knowledge for international consumption. Merry 1992 suggested that the anthropological paradigm of legal pluralism, previously applied to describe encounters between colonizers and colonized, could be applied also to describing the post–Cold War dynamics involved in the growing global popularity of human rights. Merry’s words crystallized what many had been seeing but had not yet theorized; as she put it, “transnational processes are becoming increasingly important in theorizing about the nature of local legal phenomena” (p. 357). Riles 2000 helped establish that transnational activist networks were amenable to ethnographic study based on immersive, field-base learning, detailed descriptiveness, and contextualized narrative. Established vocabularies of political and legal anthropology have since become central to anthropologists’ theorizations of North-South human rights knowledge exchange, as evidenced by essays in Goodale and Merry 2007 as well as Merry and Stern 2005 and Merry 2006b. Speed 2008 not only offers finely grained ethnographic insights into different Zapatista communities’ encounter with human rights ideas and practices, but it also draws from the distinct, indigenous rights and political, economic, and anthropological genealogies to access a denunciatory voice that had grown somewhat dim after the rise of political/legal anthropological approaches to dominance in the anthropology of human rights.

Goodale, Mark, and Sally Engle Merry, eds. 2007. The practice of human rights: Tracking law between the global and the local. Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge Univ. Press.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511819193Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Drawing on anthropological studies of human rights work from around the world, this contributory volume examines human rights in practice, giving particular attention to how human rights work and what they do in a variety of social settings.
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Merry, Sally Engle. 1992. Anthropology, law, and transnational processes. Annual Review of Anthropology 21:357–377.
DOI: 10.1146/annurev.an.21.100192.002041Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Organized under headings of “Popular Justice,” “Indigenous Rights, Human Rights, and Sovereignty,” and “State Incorporation,” the article proposes that the anthropology of law will increasingly have to take transnational processes into account.
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Merry, Sally Engle. 2006a. Human rights and gender violence: Translating international law into local justice. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
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Based on observation of UN diplomatic negotiations as well as the workings of feminist organizations and community-based women’s groups in several countries, Merry argues that it is in the meeting points in between international law and local social worlds where human rights either fails or succeeds in becoming effective in protecting women from gender violence.
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Merry, Sally Engle. 2006b. Transnational human rights and local activism: Mapping the middle. American Anthropologist 108.1: 38–51.
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Theorizes the process of translation and argues that anthropological analysis of translators helps to explain how human rights ideas and interventions circulate around the world and transform social life.
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Merry, Sally Engle, and Rachel E. Stern. 2005. The female inheritance movement in Hong Kong: Theorizing the local/global interface. Current Anthropology 46.3: 387–409.
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Poses the question of how and when individuals in various social locations come to see themselves in terms of human rights, and uses the female inheritance movement in Hong Kong in the early 1990s as a case study through which to argue that the localization of global human rights ideas depends on a complicated set of activist groups with different ideological orientations, along with translators who bridge the gaps.
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Riles, Annelise. 2000. The network inside out. Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press.
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An ethnographic account of bureaucracy, NGOs, and transnational issue networks, following the work of Fijian delegates to the 1995 Beijing World Conference on Women.
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Speed, Shannon. 2008. Rights in rebellion: Indigenous struggle and human rights in Chiapas. Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press.
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A multisited ethnography of the global discourse of human rights and its influence on the local culture, identity, and forms of resistance among indigenous Zapatista rebel communities in Chiapas, Mexico.
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International Legal Epistemology

Riles 2006 argues that a defining attribute of the anthropology of human rights is skepticism about the law. In addition to cultural relativism, anthropologists have participated in the development of a post-relativist skepticism, which leaves to one side questions about the existence of ethical universals to ask instead how legislation and litigation might work more effectively in tandem with other, nonlegal mechanisms of social change. The post-relativist anthropological skeptic may take it for granted that the law is the major structuring influence on human rights discourse, even as she tries to bring the law down a peg or two by situating it as one of several existing or imaginable social justice tools. Legal fora may be more useful as an avenue of accumulating political legitimacy than as a way of getting a decisive verdict or new law (an opinion that, as Riles 2006 points out, is shared by many international human rights lawyers). Wilson 2011 points toward the potential for detailed ethnographically grounded scholarship to contribute to debates in human rights studies and the wider international human rights community about policy and political strategies. Based on his interviews with prosecutors and defenders in the international criminal tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, Wilson finds that pivotal importance is attached to history by human rights lawyers and judges, the law standing revealed thus as something more than the decontextualizing and norm-driven process that many characterize it to be. The more broadly framed and skeptical perspectives of Comaroff and Comaroff 2006, Clarke 2009, and Goodale 2005 see the law sooner sucking the air out of other avenues of justice-seeking, to the detriment of social movement participants’ aspirations to find voice independently of state power. Clarke and Goodale 2010 provides a model of the kind of multidisciplinary exchange that the study of the practice of human rights is opening to anthropology. One irony may be that anthropologists who study human rights may see little enhancement to their disciplinary profiles as they gravitate more strongly to interdisciplinary dialogues than to discipline-internal exchanges.

Clarke, Kamari Maxine. 2009. Fictions of justice: The International Criminal Court and the challenge of legal pluralism in sub-Saharan Africa. Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge Univ. Press.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511626869Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Situates the International Criminal Court’s frequent focus on sub-Saharan Africa within a breadth of more localized justice-seeking mechanisms within this region, including the brokering of human rights agendas, the rewriting of national constitutions, Sharia law, and politicized demonstrations of religiosity.
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Clarke, Kamari Maxine, and Mark Goodale, eds. 2010. Mirrors of justice: Law and power in the post-Cold War era. Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge Univ. Press.
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The essays in this contributory volume contribute to our understanding of the multiplicity of justice in the 21st century through critical empirical and historical case studies situated in Europe, Africa, Latin America, Asia, the Middle East, and Melanesia.
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Comaroff, John L., and Jean Comaroff. 2006. Law and disorder in the postcolony: An introduction. In Law and disorder in the postcolony. Edited by Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff, 1–56. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226114101.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Proposes the concept of “lawfare” to encompass the trend of diverse gender, indigenous, and minority rights movements to use the language and tools of the law, by preference over more conventional forms of protest, which center on the voice of the oppressed.
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Goodale, Mark. 2005. Empires of law: Discipline and resistance within the transnational system. Social and Legal Studies 14.4: 553–583.
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Explores the idea that law has become newly central to a postmodern transnational system in which modernity’s classic polarities have become obscured; adherence to legality is used to create loyalty to the wider project of liberalism within late capitalism.
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Riles, Annelise. 2006. Anthropology, human rights, and legal knowledge: Culture in the iron cage. American Anthropologist 108.1: 52–65.
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Based on conversations with international human rights lawyers and participatory observation at human rights legal conferences, contends that both anthropologists who seek to describe the culture of human rights and lawyers who critically engage the international human rights regime share a common problem, that of the pervasiveness of legal instrumentalism.
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Wilson, Richard Ashby. 2011. Writing history in international criminal trials. Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge Univ. Press.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511973505Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Through research with judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys, and expert witnesses in three international criminal tribunals, Wilson finds that law and history, even though distinct ways of knowing, are combined in the courtroom in a way that challenges one to rethink history’s place in international law and human rights.
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Human Rights Discourse

There is no clearer political import to anthropology’s turn to matters of text, discourse, and representation than in anthropological critiques of human rights discourse. At times it seems as if the problem of translation, which had preoccupied the cross-cultural search for homeomorphic equivalents for Western human rights concepts, is turned on its head: it is Westerners, and not culturally defined others, who are experiencing difficulty in hearing and understanding claims based in languages of rights. Malkki 1996, an early work of critique based on ethnographic field research among Hutu refugees in Tanzania, put forward the theory that inserting particular suffering humans into the trans-historical category of “refugee” eventuated in “abstracting their predicaments from specific political, historical, cultural contexts” (p. 378), at the cost of silencing its subjects. In the author’s critique of the silencings and outright distortions involved in reviving the allegation that Haitian-ancestry sugarcane workers are being held as slaves on plantations in the Dominican Republic, Martínez 2011 adds that the decontextualizations attendant upon insertion of individuals’ stories into the universal category of the “slave” enable the revival of colonialist and masculinist adventure-tale tropes, of discovery of hidden wrongs and rescue of downtrodden innocents. The effect is much like that described by Malkki: black and largely female Southern-based activists are pushed to the wings in favor of male Whites in Shining Armor. Ticktin 2006 and Ticktin 2008 combine media studies with ethnography among pro-immigrant groups and interviews with feminist activists of differing stripes to interpret the growth of a soi-disant “humanitarian” concern for presumptively vulnerable immigrant women as the basis for a form of politics that depoliticizes; in the humanitarian optic priorities defined by immigrants and pro-immigrant organizations are pushed aside in the rush to rescue ostensibly helpless or deluded young women through police action. Essays in Wilson and Brown 2009 similarly suggest that as matters of human rights end up being persuasively relabeled as humanitarian concerns, the bright line of contrast that would in theory set the “assertive political agency” (pp. 7–8) of rights claimants apart from the passivity of beneficiaries of humanitarian assistance ends up looking rather blurry. Mamdani 2009 reasserts the value of hard-earned regional expertise as a better guide to how to respond to human rights crises than the “act now, think later” ethics of the Save Darfur movement. Redfield 2006, an ethnography of the ethical practice of the medical relief NGO Médecins Sans Frontières, gives emphasis to the collective dimensions authorizing practices of witnessing. Merry 2011 extends the critique of human rights discourse into the as yet underexplored terrain of enumeration, statistics, and tabulation.

Malkki, Liisa H. 1996. Speechless emissaries: Refugees, humanitarianism, and dehistoricization. Cultural Anthropology 11.3: 377–404.
DOI: 10.1525/can.1996.11.3.02a00050Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
An ethnographic study of Hutu refugees in Tanzania and influential analysis of the cooptation of political initiatives of oppressed and marginalized groups into depoliticized questions of humanitarian sentiment and outreach.
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Mamdani, Mahmood. 2009. Saviors and survivors: Darfur, politics, and the war on terror. New York: Pantheon.
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Places the Darfur crisis within the context of Sudan’s history and examines the efficacy of the West’s response to the ongoing violence. Deconstructs the Western-based Save Darfur movement’s persistent calls for a military response as a new form of Western global arrogance in the guise of “humanitarian intervention.”
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Martínez, Samuel. 2011. Taking better account: Contemporary slavery, gendered narratives, and the feminization of struggle. Humanity 2.2: 277–303.
DOI: 10.1353/hum.2011.0019Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Giving particular attention to visual media reports that have revived long-dormant allegations that Haitian nationals and people of Haitian ancestry are being held as slaves on the sugar plantations of Haiti’s Caribbean neighbor, the Dominican Republic, Martínez asserts that the narratives of rescue that dominate antislavery discourse today are guided by a masculinist politics, in which men, but never women, can stand up for their rights.
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Merry, Sally Engle. 2011. Measuring the world: Indicators, human rights, and global governance: With CA comment by John M. Conley. In Special Issue: Corporate lives: New perspectives on the social life of the corporate form. Edited by Damani J. Partridge, Marina Welker, and Rebecca Hardin. Current Anthropology 52.S3: S83–S95.
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Indicators of human rights outcomes are rapidly multiplying as tools for assessing and promoting a variety of social justice and reform strategies around the world, introducing a new form of knowledge production with implications for relations of power between rich and poor nations and between governments and civil society, with the effect that statistical measures tend to replace political debate with technical expertise.
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Redfield, Peter. 2006. A less modest witness. American Ethnologist 33.1: 3–26.
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Examines the practice of “witnessing” of the Médecins Sans Frontières to suggest that collective actors like nongovernmental organizations now play a central role in defining secular moral truth for an international audience.
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Ticktin, Miriam. 2006. Where ethics and politics meet: The violence of humanitarianism in France. American Ethnologist 33.1: 33–49.
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In examining the practice of humanitarian exception that makes illness a primary means by which undocumented immigrants obtain legal permit to stay in France, Ticktin argues that humanitarianism has been transformed into a form of politics, functioning as a transnational system of governance tied to capital and labor even while purporting to be apolitical.
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Ticktin, Miriam. 2008. Sexual violence as the language of border control: Where French feminist and anti‐immigrant rhetoric meet. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 33.4: 863–889.
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Describes and analyzes the discourses surrounding two seemingly vastly different topics, wearing of the Muslim headscarf and sex trafficking, which nonetheless have both been framed in the French media in gendered and violence-suffused terms as matters of state policy confronting perceived threats emerging from immigration.
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Wilson, Richard Ashby, and Richard D. Brown, eds. 2009. Humanitarianism and suffering: The mobilization of empathy. Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge Univ. Press.
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Essays in this contributory volume analyze the character, form, and voice of private or public narratives of suffering and humanitarian response, and examine how and why some narratives energize political movements of solidarity, whereas others do not.
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NGOs and IGOs

In spite of the influence deservedly attributed to Keck and Sikkink 1998, a pioneering analysis of transnational advocacy networks, the micropolitics of advocacy, monitoring, and legal organizations in the international human rights regime remains in need of study. Also as yet insufficiently remarked upon and theorized is the striking variety of institutions, practices, and outcomes revealed through ethnographic studies of nongovernmental and intergovernmental human rights organizations. No other researcher extends skepticism about rights talk further than Harri Englund, a skepticism that he bases not on doubts about cross-cultural translatability of human rights concepts but on the political will and ability of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to act independently of government meddling in Malawi’s transition to democracy (see Englund 2006). James 2010 provides a nuanced account of NGO infighting, supplemented with attention to the processes through which the elicitation of the testimony of survivors and witnesses produces a new subject, the “victim.” Warren 2010 subjects the practices of enumeration of international NGOs and intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) to similar critical scrutiny as a form of knowledge production, in relation to estimates of human trafficking and the ranking of countries in the US State Department’s Trafficking in Persons Report. Tate 2007 offers a perspective that is perhaps unique in spanning NGO, government, and military accounts of Colombia’s conflict. Also based on fieldwork in Colombia, Gill 2009 brings ethnographic attention to the question of whether transnational labor solidarity can be expressed as effectively through human rights–based approaches as through union organization. Presenting a bold hybrid of social, political, legal, and discursive analyses, Goodale 2009 is a balanced account of the promise and disappointments of rural Bolivians’ encounters with the neoliberal state.

Englund, Harri. 2006. Prisoners of freedom: Human rights and the African poor. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.
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A no-holds barred critique of legal aid and civic education NGOs in Malawi.
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Gill, Lesley. 2009. The limits of solidarity: Labor and transnational organizing against Coca-Cola. American Ethnologist 36.4: 667–680.
DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1425.2009.01202.xSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Tensions that arose among Northern “labor philanthropists” and labor unionists vis-à-vis Colombian workers suggest that human rights outreach cannot substitute for the labor solidarity that Colombian workers asked of their Northern allies and that transnational activists from the North should pay closer attention to the analyses and objectives of the working people with whom they claim solidarity.
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Goodale, Mark. 2009. Dilemmas of modernity: Bolivian encounters with law and liberalism. Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press.
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Based on a decade of research into rural Bolivians’ encounters with law and neoliberal reform, provides a compelling case study of the appropriation and reconstruction of transnational law at the local level.
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James, Erica Caple. 2010. Democratic insecurities: Violence, trauma, and intervention in Haiti. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.
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This ethnography of violence and the recounting of traumas by Haitian female survivors of political repression and gender violence in the 1991–1994 military regime concludes that efforts to promote political development and psychosocial rehabilitation may fail because of competition, strife, and corruption among the individuals and institutions that implement such initiatives.
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Keck, Margaret E., and Kathryn Sikkink. 1998. Activists beyond borders: Advocacy networks in international politics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press.
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Coined the concept of the “transnational advocacy network” to describe the significant impact of international coalitions of activists on human rights in Latin America, environmental politics, and the emergence of an international campaign around violence against women.
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Tate, Winifred. 2007. Counting the dead: The culture and politics of human rights activism in Colombia. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.
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Drawing from the life stories of high-profile activists, pioneering interviews with military officials, and research at the United Nations Human Rights Commission in Geneva, Tate finds that radically different ideas about human rights have shaped the thinking of three groups of human rights professionals: nongovernmental activists, state representatives, and military officers.
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Warren, Kay B. 2010. The illusiveness of counting “victims” and the concreteness of ranking countries: Trafficking in persons from Colombia to Japan. In Sex, drugs, and body counts: The politics of numbers in global crime and conflict. Edited by Peter Andreas and Kelly M. Greenhill, 110–126. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press.
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A multisited and hybrid model of analysis of the politics of numbers relating to sex trafficking between Colombia and Japan.
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Subjectification Through Violence and Suffering

No set of human rights–relevant publications produced by anthropologists has gained wider circulation among students of the humanities than the monumental three-part series on “social suffering”: Kleinman, et al. 1997; Das, et al. 2000; and Das 2001. Goldstein 2003 and Goldstein 2004 blur the lines between victim and perpetrator subjectivities by looking at incidents of lynching of suspected criminals by residents of marginal neighborhoods in Cochabamba, Bolivia—not so much as examples of community policing run amok as performances of dissatisfaction with the neoliberal retrenchment of the state and the attendant forfeiture of modernity’s promises of growing progress, prosperity, and citizen security. Allen 2008 speaks similarly to how the routinized and the everyday become suffused with political feeling and meaning under situations of serious and prolonged insecurity. Green 1994 and Shaw 2007 both provide ethnographies that testify to the haunting persistence of experiences of terror, but they come to opposing conclusions about survivors’ capability to transcend violent pasts, differences that may have to do, as much as anything else, with the degree to which circumstances permit people to see themselves as agents capable of shaping their own futures.

Allen, Lori. 2008. Getting by the occupation: How violence became normal during the second Palestinian intifada. Cultural Anthropology 23.3: 453–487.
DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1360.2008.00015.xSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Through study of commemorative cultural production and basic acts of physically getting by during the second Palestinian intifada, this essay analyzes the spaciotemporal, embodied, and symbolic aspects of the experience of violence, and the political significance of cultural practices whereby violence is routinized.
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Das, Veena, ed. 2001. Remaking a world: Violence, social suffering, and recovery. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.
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Completes a triptych of contributory volumes on social suffering, violence, and recovery. The essays explore the ways communities “cope” with—endure, work through, break apart under, transcend—traumatic and other more insidious forms of violence, addressing the effects of violence at the level of local worlds, interpersonal relations, and individual lives.
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Das, Veena, Arthur Kleinman, Mamphela Ramphele, and Pamela Reynolds, eds. 2000. Violence and subjectivity. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.
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The second in a trilogy of contributory volumes considering the ways in which violence shapes subjectivity and acts upon people’s capacity to engage everyday life. The contributors contest a political geography that divides the world into “violence-prone” and “peaceful” areas, and they suggest that such descriptions themselves contribute to violence.
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Goldstein, Daniel M. 2003. “In our own hands”: Lynching, justice, and the law in Bolivia. American Ethnologist 30.1: 22–43.
DOI: 10.1525/ae.2003.30.1.22Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Examines an incident of vigilante violence in a peripheral neighborhood of Cochabamba, Bolivia, to explore the ways in which vigilantism acts as a moral complaint against state inadequacy, challenging state legitimacy and redefining ideas about justice, citizenship, and law in the process.
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Goldstein, Daniel M. 2004. The spectacular city: Violence and performance in urban Bolivia. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press.
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By examining folkloric festivals and vigilante violence within the same analytical framework—as public spectacle—attention is drawn to how marginalized urban migrants performatively assert their national belonging and express their grievances against the inadequacies of the state’s official legal order.
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Green, Linda. 1994. Fear as a way of life. Cultural Anthropology 9.2: 227–256.
DOI: 10.1525/can.1994.9.2.02a00040Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Characterizes the experience of fear and intimidation and follow-on effects of suspicion and ambiguity in a post-conflict Guatemalan community as an “invisible violence.”
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Kleinman, Arthur, Veena Das, and Margaret M. Lock, eds. 1997. Social suffering. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.
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A multidisciplinary contributory volume addressing the human consequences of war, famine, depression, disease, and torture. Makes the case that neither the cultural resources of tradition nor those of modernity’s various programs seem adequate to cope with social suffering in modern times.
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Shaw, Rosalind. 2007. Displacing violence: Making Pentecostal memory in postwar Sierra Leone. Cultural Anthropology 22.1: 66–93.
DOI: 10.1525/can.2007.22.1.66Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Displaced Sierra Leonean youth in a Pentecostal church write and perform plays that are silent on the subject of the war but re-narrate it in the idiom of spiritual warfare against a subterranean demonic realm known as the Underworld. By reworking the war through the lens of the Underworld, memories of terror and violence are transformed in ways that allow youth a greater measure of agency.
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Witnessing and Testimony

Fassin 2008 uses the term “political subjectification” to describe “the advent of subjects and subjectivities onto a political scene” (p. 533). The subjects so produced “are figures that enable individuals to be described (by others) and identified (by themselves) in the public arena” (p. 533). Surely no inquiry into infringements of human rights is possible without description and identification of individuals as witnesses to harms inflicted on others or as sufferers of such harms. As the essays in Arias 2001 attest, the intensity of public expectations surrounding the witnessing of heinous wrongs is on display through the controversy triggered by Stoll 1999, which exposed untruths contained in the celebrated first-person testimonial of atrocity and survival during Guatemala’s civil war, I, Rigoberta Menchú. Feldman 2007 and the essays collected in Wilson and Mitchell 2003 suggest that diversity in subjectification processes is a product more of changing regimes of governance than of culture. The gender dimension of varied testimonial performance emerges with particular clarity in Merry 2003 and Ross 2003. Slyomovics 2005, by contrast, highlights the diversity of forms in which human rights was “performed” in Morocco under King Hasan II, bringing to the fore again the challenge to human rights investigators and their readers of reliably seeing past cultural difference to recognize witnessing as witnessing when they see and hear it.

Arias, Arturo, ed. 2001. The Rigoberta Menchú controversy. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press.
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A collection of previously published essays, supplemented by a response by David Stoll, which respond to the controversy triggered by Stoll’s exposé of untruths in Menchú’s life story, I, Rigoberta Menchú.
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Fassin, Didier. 2008. The humanitarian politics of testimony: Subjectification through trauma in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Cultural Anthropology 23.3: 531–558.
DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1360.2008.00017.xSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Examines the increasing copresence of psychiatrists and psychologists with sufferers and firsthand witnesses at sites of traumatic events, and introduces a new vision in which trauma appears less as a clinical category than as a political argument. Sufferers, witnesses, and responders, Palestinian and Israeli, are coproduced and equated as victims, thus pushing aside both the individual and collective histories of the subjects.
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Feldman, Ilana. 2007. Difficult distinctions: Refugee law, humanitarian practice, and political identification in Gaza. Cultural Anthropology 22.1: 129–169.
DOI: 10.1525/can.2007.22.1.129Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Argues that humanitarianism, despite commitments to political neutrality, often has profound and enduring political effects: humanitarian distinctions, in tandem with the emerging postwar refugee regime, coproduced the “refugee” as a central figure in the Palestinian political landscape.
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Merry, Sally Engle. 2003. Rights talk and the experience of law: Implementing women’s human rights to protection from violence. Human Rights Quarterly 25.2: 343–381.
DOI: 10.1353/hrq.2003.0020Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
The adoption of a rights consciousness requires experiences with the legal system that confirm that subjectivity. Rights-defined selves emerge from supportive encounters with police, prosecutors, judges, and probation officers.
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Ross, Fiona C. 2003. Bearing witness: Women and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa. London and Sterling, VA: Pluto.
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A study of women’s testimony before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, giving particular attention to the extent to which women avoid talking about or are silent about certain forms of violence and suffering. Offering a wealth of firsthand examples, a subtle understanding is reached of the achievements and the limitations of testimony as a measure of suffering and recovery generally.
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Slyomovics, Susan. 2005. The performance of human rights in Morocco. Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press.
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Argues that under the oppressive regime of King Hasan II, funerals, eulogies, mock trials, vigils and sit-ins, public testimony and witnessing, storytelling and poetry recitals were all media through which human rights were performed, constituting strategies for opening public space.
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Stoll, David. 1999. Rigoberta Menchú and the story of all poor Guatemalans. Boulder, CO: Westview.
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Points out inconsistencies between the author’s findings, based on field research among Guatemalan civil war survivors as well as study of archival sources, and the memoir that Nobel Peace Prize laureate Rigoberta Menchú wrote with Elizabeth Burgos. Stoll raises questions also about how and why Northern academics and social justice activists romanticized Latin American guerrillas.
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Wilson, Richard Ashby, and Jon P. Mitchell, eds. 2003. Human rights in global perspective: Anthropological studies of rights, claims and entitlements. London: Routledge.
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A contributory volume of essays united by critique of the production of certain types of subjects and events, through the pursuit of rights agendas and legal processes, that elide the inherent ambiguity of social life.
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Visual Advocacy and New Media

With the rise of visual media and Internet-based communication as arenas for the conceptualization and dissemination of human rights messages, and as independent activists and artists increasingly challenge human rights professionals for dominance in shaping those messages, anthropologists face the challenge of describing and analyzing visual registers of communication. Cultural relativism was the conceptual frame for Faris 1993 and Turner 1992 to engage an early debate over indigenous media and what it might signify for cultural survival. The Faris-Turner debates parallel the larger anthropological discourse on human rights generally (or that on the contentious issue of female genital cutting), in passing from an initial stage of debate about norms to a stage of ethnographic inquiry. Put simply, as anthropologists debated new media, the people among whom they study were indigenizing the technologies under debate, leaving anthropologists once again to play catch-up. Ginsburg 1994, Ginsburg 2004, and Ginsburg 2005 amplify the terms of ethnographic study of indigenous media by pointing out that the full meaning of these for indigenous struggles for rights, recognition, and cultural revitalization can emerge only by going beyond what appears on screen to also take consideration of the social process through which it appears. McLagan 2003 has led the way in alerting cultural anthropologists to human rights monitor groups’ increasing reliance on visual communication and the diversity of the registers in which audiences to which human rights professionals speak. Allen 2009 signals continuing possibilities for place-defined ethnographic inquiry to open a window on how human rights gains meaning over time, as well as confirming the necessity of bringing concepts and texts into analytic dialogue with images.

Allen, Lori A. 2009. Martyr bodies in the media: Human rights, aesthetics, and the politics of immediation in the Palestinian intifada. American Ethnologist 36.1: 161–180.
DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1425.2008.01100.xSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Both the growth of the human rights regime in the Palestinian occupied territories and the spread of visual media produced a “politics of immediation” during the second Palestinian intifada, consisting of an appeal to rights situated in human being and corporeality, rather than in state citizenship, and the mobilization of representations of people in states of acute physical and emotional distress.
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Faris, James C. 1993. A response to Terence Turner. Anthropology Today 9.1: 12–13.
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Argues that the linear, realist narrative conventions imposed by film will dissolve indigenous people’s knowledge of their communities’ particular and distinctive ways of storytelling.
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Ginsburg, Faye. 1994. Embedded aesthetics: Creating a discursive space for indigenous media. Cultural Anthropology 9.3: 365–382.
DOI: 10.1525/can.1994.9.3.02a00080Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Embedded aesthetics refers to systems of evaluation that refuse to separate textual or visual production from broader arenas of social relations, including the circumstances of production, dissemination, and consumption of media.
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Ginsburg, Faye. 2004. Atanarjuat off-screen: From “media reservations” to the world stage. American Anthropologist 105.4: 827–831.
DOI: 10.1525/aa.2003.105.4.827Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Description and analysis of the production of Zacharias Kunuk’s Atanarjuat (The Fast Runner), with particular attention given to the community participatory features of the scriptwriting and filming process of the Igloolik Isuma Productions team that Kunuk heads.
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Ginsburg, Faye. 2005. Black screens and cultural citizenship. Visual Anthropology Review 21.1–2: 80–97.
DOI: 10.1525/var.2005.21.1-2.80Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Aboriginal films contribute to a process of reimagining Australia as a multicultural nation, not only by offering alternative accountings that undermine the fictions presented by unified national narratives; their work also demonstrates that a textual analysis is not sufficient if it does not also take into account the offscreen cultural and political labor of Aboriginal activists whose interventions have made this possible.
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McLagan, Meg. 2003. Principles, publicity, and politics: Notes on human rights media. American Anthropologist 105.3: 605–612.
DOI: 10.1525/aa.2003.105.3.605Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
The global spread of electronic and new media technologies is transforming the ways in which social movements organize their relationship to publicity, with “image politics” becoming increasingly central to the ways justice claims are made.
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Turner, Terence. 1992. Defiant images: The Kayapo appropriation of video. Anthropology Today 8.6: 5–16.
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Recounts how the Kayapo of the Xingu, Brazil, came to use video as a means of documenting infringements of human rights and territorial sovereignty.
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The Researcher’s Situation

While the anthropology of human rights as a subfield seems to have broken with anxieties about what authorizes the ethnographer to speak, there is a need for both more reflection to be given to the position from which anthropologists study human rights and better conceptual tools for talking about anthropologists’ relationships to the human rights practitioners and activist indigenes, peasants, and proletarians who are research subjects. In pondering what is to be gained and lost in braiding together anthropological academic research priorities with the knowledge production needs of host communities, prevailing distinctions between studying “up” and “down” are complicated by whether the scholarly/advocacy setting and the anthropologist’s own experience and prior commitments incline one to see oneself as a coproducer of human rights knowledge with local activists (Speed 2006), a complicitous but autonomous student of local histories and realities (Rappaport 2005), a particular kind of knowledge expert among diverse experts (Hale 2006), or a multisited ethnographer uncomfortably attempting to maintain more than one allegiance to diverse transnational activist groups (Cunningham 1999).

Cunningham, Hilary. 1999. The ethnography of transnational social activism: Understanding the global as local practice. American Ethnologist 26.3: 583–604.
DOI: 10.1525/ae.1999.26.3.583Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Documents and contrasts the development of transnational identities among two groups of political activists and examines the historical conditions underlying their differences. Includes discussion of overlap in terms of analysis between the anthropologist and one group of activists under study.
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Hale, Charles R. 2006. Activist research v. cultural critique: Indigenous land rights and the contradictions of politically engaged anthropology. Cultural Anthropology 21.1: 96–120.
DOI: 10.1525/can.2006.21.1.96Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Focusing on the researcher’s involvement in indigenous tribal territory demarcation and expert testimony before the Inter-American Human Rights Court, in the Awas Tingni v. Government of Nicaraguan case for recognition of ancestral lands, illustrates the promise of activist research, in spite of the inevitable contradictions that present themselves even after courtroom victories.
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Rappaport, Joanne. 2005. Intercultural utopias: Public intellectuals, cultural experimentation, and ethnic pluralism in Colombia. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press.
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Centering on Colombia’s Cauca region, well known for its history of indigenous mobilization, Rappaport interweaves the stories of individuals with an analysis of the history of the Regional Indigenous Council of Cauca and other indigenous organizations, and also extends the frame of study to include intercultural relationships linking indigenous activists, nonindigenous urban intellectuals, anthropologists, local teachers, shamans, and politicians.
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Speed, Shannon. 2006. At the crossroads of human rights and anthropology: Toward a critically engaged activist research. American Anthropologist 108.1: 66–76.
DOI: 10.1525/aa.2006.108.1.66Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Makes a case for activist research, in which the ethnographer merges her efforts with those of host communities and human rights organizations. Activist research brings tensions inherent in anthropological research on human rights to the fore, making them a productive part of the process and allowing cultural critique to be merged with political action to produce knowledge that is empirically grounded, theoretically valuable, and ethically viable.
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Genocide

Denich 1994, Hayden 1996, and Hayden 2007 shed light on genocide’s ultimate, existential challenge to human rights: it is not only unsurpassed by other forms of abuse in scale and destructiveness, but it also typically involves a denial by its perpetrators of the very humanity of those whom they seek to destroy. Hinton 2002 and Hinton 2005 have gained recognition among multidisciplinary human rights studies communities as essential works on genocide. Mamdani 2001 affirms anthropologists’ unique ability to tie together the “big picture” of regional colonial and postcolonial history with detailed observations on individual and group identity and interethnic relations. Jennifer Schirmer gained unsurpassed access to the military perpetrators of human rights atrocities in Guatemala, resulting in Schirmer 1998. Sanford 2003 expands upon Schirmer’s perspectives in a wide-ranging account of that country’s citizens’ post-Violencia search for justice.

Denich, Bette. 1994. Dismembering Yugoslavia: Nationalist ideologies and the symbolic revival of genocide. American Ethnologist 21.2: 367–390.
DOI: 10.1525/ae.1994.21.2.02a00080Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Focuses on the symbolic dynamics of genocide as a critical underlying issue in the revival of 19th-century Serbian and Croatian nation-state ideologies. The “forgotten” burial sites of massacre victims provided a powerful reservoir of traumatic memory, subject to manipulation on the part of all who seized the moment to reconstitute the state according to nationalist definitions.
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Hayden, Robert M. 1996. Imagined communities and real victims: Self-determination and ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia. American Ethnologist 23.4: 783–801.
DOI: 10.1525/ae.1996.23.4.02a00060Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Grounded in the texts of the constitutions read against local Yugoslav understandings of their terms, in the bureaucratic practices of granting and denying citizenship on an ethnic basis, and in the geography of the wars in the former Yugoslavia, Hayden views “ethnic cleansing” in terms of the structural logic advanced by Mary Douglas as justifications for processes of exclusion, from the denial of citizenship to expulsion and murder.
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Hayden, Robert M. 2007. Moral vision and impaired insight: The imagining of other peoples’ communities in Bosnia. Current Anthropology 48.1: 105–131.
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Argues that international political actors insist on efforts to create a Bosnia in accordance with their own images rather than accept that many of the people there view their world and their fate far differently. The result has been to hinder the reconstruction of the region and perhaps also to foreclose the possibility that the peoples of Bosnia will draw on their own cultural knowledge to reforge their own interconnections.
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Hinton, Alexander Laban. 2002. Genocide: An anthropological reader. Oxford: Blackwell.
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Gathers together important essays to lay the foundations for an anthropology of genocide.
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Hinton, Alexander Laban. 2005. Why did they kill? Cambodia in the shadow of genocide. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.
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Focuses on the devastation that took place in Cambodia from April 1975 to January 1979 under the Khmer Rouge, including consideration of ways in which human difference is manufactured, how identity and meaning are constructed, and how emotionally resonant forms of cultural knowledge are incorporated into genocidal ideologies.
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Mamdani, Mahmood. 2001. When victims become killers: Colonialism, nativism, and the genocide in Rwanda. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.
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Examines the historical, geographical, and political forces that made it possible for so many Hutu to turn so brutally on their Tutsi neighbors. The nature of political identities generated during colonialism are considered, as are failures of the nationalist revolution to transcend these identities, and regional demographic and political currents that reach well beyond Rwanda.
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Sanford, Victoria. 2003. Buried secrets: Truth and human rights in Guatemala. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
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Based on testimonies from hundreds of massacre survivors and on interviews with forensic anthropologists, human rights monitors, high-ranking military officers, and guerrilla combatants, Sanford demonstrates that the Guatemalan army carried out an intentional genocide against the Maya. She also chronicles the journey of Maya survivors seeking truth, justice, and community healing.
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Schirmer, Jennifer. 1998. The Guatemalan military project: A violence called democracy. Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press.
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Documents the military’s role in human rights violations through a series of extensive interviews striking in their brutal frankness and unique in their firsthand descriptions and post hoc justifications of the campaign against Guatemala’s citizens.
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Post-Conflict Societies

Wilson 2001 describes and analyzes the workings of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and popular justice in the post-apartheid era, yet it also raises the thorny ethico-political questions of whether the TRC inadvertently sent the message that some people can confess to murder and walk free, and whether human rights institutions more generally “ignore popular conceptualizations of justice at their own peril” (p. 227). Nelson 1996 and Nelson 1999 go beyond the paradigm of legal pluralism to argue that the meaning of “culture” and discourses around indigenous identity and relations with nonindigenous Guatemala are nodal points for the airing of conflicts left unresolved after decades of armed conflict. Sundar 2004, by contrast, places the focus squarely on state institutions and dominant political discourses by which states conceal their culpability in the present by attributing culpability to others, including their past selves. Johnston and Slyomovics 2009 provides an essential compendium of anthropological perspectives on transitional societies and the ethical and methodological difficulties of studying them.

Johnston, Barbara Rose, and Susan Slyomovics, eds. 2009. Waging war, making peace: Reparations and human rights. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast.
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Based on the experiences of anthropologists who document abuses and serve as expert witnesses, case studies from around the world offer insight into reparations proceedings; the professional and personal risks to researchers, victims, and human rights advocates; and how to come to terms with the political compromises of reparations in the face of the human need for justice.
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Nelson, Diane M. 1996. Maya hackers and the cyberspatialized nation-state: Modernity, ethnostalgia, and a lizard queen in Guatemala. Cultural Anthropology 11.3: 287–308.
DOI: 10.1525/can.1996.11.3.02a00010Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Argues that cultural rights activism is not just a safer option in post–civil war Guatemala but an essential precondition for indigenous identity to endure in a postmodern world. Every act that challenges the binary that equates indigenous with backward and ignorant is comparable to a “recoding” the conceptual “software” of domination.
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Nelson, Diane M. 1999. A finger in the wound: Body politics in quincentennial Guatemala. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.
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Drawing from political economy, cultural studies, and psychoanalysis, Nelson explores relations among Mayan cultural rights activists, nonindigenous Guatemalans, and the state as a site of struggle, as well as transnational forces including Nobel Peace Prizes, UN conventions, neoliberal economics, global TV, and anthropology, to address questions about Guatemalan identity at the moment of the Columbus quincentenary.
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Sundar, Nandini. 2004. Toward an anthropology of culpability. American Ethnologist 31.2: 145–163.
DOI: 10.1525/ae.2004.31.2.145Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
As against culturalist explanations for mass violence, Sundar argues for the need to look at the institutional sites through which public morality is constructed, illustrating this approach with reference to the killing of Muslims in Gujarat, India, in 2002, and to the invasion of Iraq by the United States in 2003.
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Wilson, Richard Ashby. 2001. The politics of truth and reconciliation in South Africa: Legitimizing the post-apartheid state. Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge Univ. Press.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511522291Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Based on extended ethnographic fieldwork, illustrates the impact of the TRC in the Johannesburg area, arguing that the TRC had little effect on popular ideas of justice as retribution.
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Female Genital Cutting

In the pre-2000 era when cultural relativism was at the center of discussion concerning anthropology’s relationship to human rights, there was no more controversial a topic than the practices variously described as “female circumcision,” “clitoridectomy,” “excision,” “female genital mutilation,” “female genital surgeries,” and “female genital cutting” (FGC). Gruenbaum 2001 and Silverman 2004 review the ink spilled by anthropologists in imploring the discipline to “take a stand” and “draw the line” in opposition to FGC. Those admonitions neither specified what it might mean for anthropologists to take a stand nor stopped to see what women’s rights activists were already doing to end FGC in areas of the world where forms of it were customary. Through a plea for understanding the symbolism and social context of FGC, Boddy 1989 stood apart in implicitly making an argument for Western human rights advocates to remain concerned but cool down their rhetoric and quiet the clamor to intervene at any cost. The focus has since shifted away from asking whether or not to take a stand to inquiring into how diverse groups are seeking to persuade others to stop FGC. Through a review of existing publications, Obermeyer 1999, with similar political import, questions both the reliability of what was known about FGC and the appropriateness of attaching paramount importance to combating FGC in isolation from attacking the multiple other sources of women’s subordination. Abusharaf 2006 and Abusharaf 2009 have done more than any other anthropologist’s works to bring both field research–based information and the insights of African activists to bear on the discussion. Walley 1997 and Shell-Duncan 2008 shift the focus to Western human rights discourse and the status of icon of oppressed womanhood that FGC has come to command.

Abusharaf, Rogaia Mustafa. 2009. Transforming displaced women in Sudan: Politics and the body in a squatter settlement. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226002019.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
In this ethnography of a Khartoum area squatter settlement, Abusharaf examines the ways in which internally displaced women’s bodies are politicized by their displacement, analyzing issues such as religious conversion, marriage, and female circumcision.
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Abusharaf, Rogaia Mustafa, ed. 2006. Female circumcision: Multicultural perspectives. Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press.
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Gathers together African scholars and activists to examine the issue within its various cultural and historical contexts, the debates on circumcision regarding African refugee and immigrant populations in the United States, and human rights efforts.
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Boddy, Janice Patricia. 1989. Wombs and alien spirits: Women, men, and the Zār cult in northern Sudan. Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press.
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An influential interpretation of male and female circumcision rituals as processes through which young men and women are symbolically completed as mature males and females.
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Gruenbaum, Ellen. 2001. The female circumcision controversy: An anthropological perspective. Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press.
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A pivotal publication in the FGC debate in both its questioning of the validity of Western arguments against FGC and its analysis of Sudanese-led efforts at ending it.
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Obermeyer, Carla Makhlouf. 1999. Female genital surgeries: The known, the unknown, and the unknowable. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 13.1: 79–106.
DOI: 10.1525/maq.1999.13.1.79Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Reviews the literature on FGC and questions the extent to which available research supports commonly accepted “facts” about the prevalence and harmful effects of these practices. Also discussed are implications of research on FGC for both the societies where FGC is practiced and those whose gaze has been so intensely focused on the customs of others.
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Shell-Duncan, Bettina. 2008. From health to human rights: Female genital cutting and the politics of intervention. American Anthropologist 110.2: 225–236.
DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1433.2008.00028.xSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Raises questions regarding the prominent placement of FGC in the international human rights movement: What are the ramifications of framing FGC as a human rights violation? What actions are mandated by a human rights approach? What perils and pitfalls potentially arise from the adoption of a rights-based framework, and how might they be avoided?
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Silverman, Eric K. 2004. Anthropology and circumcision. Annual Review of Anthropology 33:419–445.
DOI: 10.1146/annurev.anthro.33.070203.143706Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Reviews the anthropology of male and female circumcision over the past century.
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Walley, Christine J. 1997. Searching for “voices”: Feminism, anthropology, and the global debate over female genital operations. Cultural Anthropology 12.3: 405–438.
DOI: 10.1525/can.1997.12.3.405Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
On the basis of field research experience as a secondary school teacher among Sabaot people of rural Kenya, uncertainties are pondered about determining which of the many voices and opinions that can be heard about FGC are “authentic” and “reliable.”
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