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Anthropology, Human Rights, And Legal Knowledge: Culture In The Iron Cage, Annelise Riles
Anthropology, Human Rights, And Legal Knowledge: Culture In The Iron Cage, Annelise Riles
Cornell Law Faculty Publications
In this article, I draw on ethnography in the particular zone of engagement between anthropologists, on the one hand, and human rights lawyers who are skeptical of the human rights regime, on the other hand. I argue that many of the problems anthropologists encounter with the appropriation and marginalization of anthropology's analytical tools can be understood in terms of the legal character of human rights. In particular, discursive engagement between anthropology and human rights is animated by the pervasive instrumentalism of legal knowledge. I contend that both anthropologists who seek to describe the culture of human rights and lawyers who …
Introducing Discipline: Anthropology And Human Rights Administrations, Iris Jean-Klein, Annelise Riles
Introducing Discipline: Anthropology And Human Rights Administrations, Iris Jean-Klein, Annelise Riles
Cornell Law Faculty Publications
Anthropologists engage human rights administrations with an implicit promise that our discipline has something unique to offer. The articles in this special issue turn questions about relevance and care so often heard in the context of debates about human rights outside in. They focus not on how anthropology can contribute to human rights activities, but on what anthropological encounters with human rights contribute to the development of our discipline. They ask, how exactly do we render the subject relevant to anthropology? Reflecting on some ways anthropologists in this field have dispensed care for their subjects, the authors highlight two modalities …
Rights Inside Out: The Case Of The Women's Human Rights Campaign, Annelise Riles
Rights Inside Out: The Case Of The Women's Human Rights Campaign, Annelise Riles
Cornell Law Faculty Publications
This essay traces the relationship between activists and academics involved in the campaign for “women’s rights as human rights” as a case study of the relationship between different classes of what I call “knowledge professionals” self-consciously acting in a transnational domain. The puzzle that animates this essay is the following: how was it that at the very moment at which a critique of “rights” and a reimagination of rights as “rights talk” proved to be such fertile ground for academic scholarship did the same “rights” prove to be an equally fertile ground for activist networking and lobbying activities? The paper …