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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
Annelise Riles
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 …
A New Agenda For The Cultural Study Of Law: Taking On The Technicalities, Annelise Riles
A New Agenda For The Cultural Study Of Law: Taking On The Technicalities, Annelise Riles
Annelise Riles
This article urges humanistic legal studies to take the technical dimensions of law as a central focus of inquiry. Using archival and ethnographic investigations into developments in American Conflict of Laws doctrines as an example, and building on insights in the anthropology of knowledge and in science and technology studies that focus on technical practices in scientific and engineering domains, it aims to show that the technologies of law - an ideology that law is a tool and an accompanying technical aesthetic of legal knowledge - are far more central and far more interesting dimensions of legal practice than humanists …