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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 …
Property As Legal Knowledge: Means And Ends, Annelise Riles
Property As Legal Knowledge: Means And Ends, Annelise Riles
Cornell Law Faculty Publications
This article takes anthropologists’ renewed interest in property theory as an opportunity to consider legal theory-making as an ethnographic subject in its own right. My focus is on one particular construct – the instrument, or relation of means to ends, that animates both legal and anthropological theories about property. An analysis of the workings of this construct leads to the conclusion that rather than critique the ends of legal knowledge, the anthropology of property should devote itself to articulating its own means.