RICHARD ASHBY WILSON

Afterword to Anthropology and Human Rights

in a New Key: The Social Life of Human Rights

ABSTRACT In this article, I argue for an ethnographic approach to human rights that recognizes the plural and fragmentary nature
of the international rights regime and the ideological promiscuity of rights talk. Instead of determining in advance the social or political
character of rights, anthropologists could profitably draw from the insights of early 20th-century legal realists and look closely at the
underlying assumptions and hidden practices of political and legal processes. Studying the social life of human rights would involve
focusing on, inter alia, the performative dimensions of human rights, the dynamics of social mobilization, and the attitudinal changes
of elite and nonelite social actors toward formulations of rights and justice, both inside and outside the legal process. I conclude
with a review of recent anthropological research on human rights epistemology and evaluate its implications for human rights policy.
[Keywords: human rights, legal anthropology, political anthropology, epistemology, human rights policy]

THE INTERNAL COMPLEXITY OF HUMAN RIGHTS
In his introduction to this In Focus, Goodale justifiably
calls for an ecumenical anthropology of human rights
that meshes an awareness of social theory with an atten-
tion to empirical specificity. An ethnographic approach to
human rights is especially appropriate because the human
rights regime includes a vast array of different kinds of
moral and political projects, which are often incompati-
ble. The human rights framework is manifestly plural in its
conceptualization, spanning the continuum from the aus-
tere liberal individualism of international criminal law to a
full-blown multiculturalism that advocates group rights and
the self-determination of peoples. Further, human rights are
found in very different kinds of sites, from established legal
codes enforceable in domestic courts (e.g., habeas corpus
to mellifluous international declarations that nation-states
eagerly endorse but that remain unenforceable).
Human rights are advocated by a bewildering array of
assorted political constituencies, from liberal individual-
ists to marginalized ethnic minorities. Debates have raged
about the relative importance of individual rights versus
collective rights, with some liberals insisting that human
rights should focus on core individual civilpolitical rights
because collective group rights are either legally meaning-
less or politically misguided.1 Minority rights groups have
countered that human rights have long incorporated collec-
tive rights elementsfrom the 1948 Genocide Convention
to the 1966 International Covenant on Economic, Social
and Cultural Rights to the 1994 Draft Declaration on the
Rights of Indigenous Peoples. This is only one fault line of
internal disagreement, and clearly a number of struggles are
going on within the international human rights field over
the direction of human rights law and policy.
To complicate things further, human rights have come
to apply to corporate actors as well as individuals and states.
As a result, multinational corporations such as Reebok and
Royal Dutch Shell have reacted to criticism of exploitative
practices in Asia, Africa, and Latin America by setting up hu-
man rights foundations or publicly launching human rights
consultation programs.2 Finally, beneath the formulation of
policy and law in the international arena, human rights are
situated in a diversity of institutional and societal contexts,
from established liberal democracies such as France, where
the state has a highly centralized and dirigiste bureaucracy,
to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which inaugu-
rated a new constitution replete with rights protections in
2005 but where state institutions barely function in consid-
erable swathes of the national territory.
This diversity and complexity results from how human
rights became, in the second half of the 20th century, a
political value with global ambitions, analogous to political
metanarratives such as liberal democracy or socialism
although the loose human rights framework offers much
less in the way of actual content or vision of the common

AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, Vol. 108, Issue 1, pp. 7783, ISSN 0002-7294, electronic ISSN 1548-1433.
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78 American Anthropologist Vol. 108, No. 1 March 2006
good. In their barest codified form, human rights are lists
of things that governments cannot do to their citizens (e.g.,
torture or enslave them) and lists of things that they must
do for their citizens (e.g., educate them and give them a
fair trial). Although international human rights covenants
do share certain basic principles such as equality before the
law and a secularized view of human dignity, they do not
provide the basis for a fully worked out moral or political
philosophy. This must be formulated elsewhere and then
brought to discussions of rights.
In addition to its fragmented and partial character, the
doctrinal ambiguity of human rights talk provides one ex-
planation for its apparent success in bringing together a
broad range of distinct, and sometimes openly contradic-
tory, kinds of political claims. In postapartheid South Africa,
both Communist Party members and conservative neolib-
erals applauded the inclusion of human rights provisions in
the new 1996 Constitution. The sheer ideological promiscu-
ity and slipperiness of rights talk precludes a definitive clas-
sification that human rights are inherently dominant or
hegemonic and essential to a U.S.-led neoliberal political
economic project, or that they are a universal charter for the
liberation of the weak and dispossessed.
Such formulations do a disservice to the complexity
of international and local political processes. In addition,
they miss the crucial distinction between what govern-
ments do with human rights and what social movements
seek to achieve through them. Since September 11, 2001
(9/11), the United States has broken with the (albeit frag-
ile and partial) multilateral approach to global security
through human rights that had emerged in the 1990s; fur-
thermore, U.S. foreign policy has consistently opposed the
further extension of the jurisdiction of international hu-
man rights institutions such as the International Criminal
Court.3 Erstwhile human rights scholars such as Michael Ig-
natieff (2002, 2004) ask whether the human rights era has
come and gone, and now maintain that human rights do
not provide a political compass in the context of the War
on Terror. Although security concerns appear to trump hu-
man rights in the arena of international affairs, many lo-
cally based social movements, from shantytown dwellers
in Guatemala City to HIV/AIDS activists in Cape Town,
continue to push their claims in the language of human
rights.
Ethnographers can be more sensitive to the vicissitudes
of political contestation that take place in the language of
rights if they do not assume in advance that human rights
are either a governmental ethics of power4 or a grassroots,
emancipationist weapon of the weak.5 As Jane Cowan as-
serts in this In Focus collection, anthropologists need to
formulate a theoretical framework that can apprehend the
ways that human rights are simultaneously enabling and
constraining. They both facilitate social and political mobi-
lization against maltreatment and mayinsofar as human
rights direct political aspirations toward the established le-
gal processnormalize and legitimize unequal structures of
power and authority.
Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2392893
ETHNOGRAPHIES OF HUMAN RIGHTS PRACTICES
Thus far, I have sought to establish that a single disposition
toward the entire global human rights framework is proba-
bly impractical and unrealistic, on the grounds that it would
either be logically self-contradictory or applicable only in
some rights claims and not others.6 This is not to say that
we cannot identify some general patterns, but that general-
ized abstractions have to bear the hallmarks of grounded
theory, in which intellectual abstractions remain embed-
ded in identifiable empirical findings. This approach takes
us beyond the logically coherent, although empirically im-
plausible, theories of universalism and relativism to exam-
ine, pace Malinowski, what people say they do with hu-
man rights and what they actually do with human rights in
specific fields of political contestation.7 The kinds of ques-
tions we might ask include: what sort of social practices are
rights claims embedded in (e.g., kinship networks, ideas of
religious community)? How do various social actors under-
stand the various claims, immunities, privileges, and liber-
ties articulated in the language of human rights? How do
they apply them or reject them? And what do they hope to
achieve in so doing?
In anthropological shorthand, this means carefully
documenting the social life of rightsthat is, the social
forms that coalesce in and around formal rights prac-
tices and formulations, and that are usually hidden in the
penumbra of the official political process. Concretely, this
could mean examining the dynamics of social mobiliza-
tion in rights-based social movements, or the performa-
tive dimensions of rights movements including marches,
vigils, funerals, and so forth.8 It could mean charting the
trajectory of rights claims through legal and political chan-
nels and interrogating the basic formulations (e.g., jus-
tice and human rights) held by various social actors,
from elite officials to individuals from historically disen-
franchised groups. It could mean understanding how ideas
of justice are shaped by transnational political discourses,
globalizing religious doctrines and practices, ideas of per-
sonhood and the body, kinship obligations, and the like.
How are such values transformed, or left untouchedas the
case may bethrough their encounter with national and
global rights-based political and legal processes? Recently,
a group of philosophers have sought to locate the founda-
tions of human rights in everyday human sociality rather
than the rational actor and positive law, and therefore an-
thropological studies of the social life of rights could have
some intriguing normative implications as well.9
Adopting a broadly empirical approach to human
rights has already led ethnographers to make important
contributions to debates about what the globalization of
human rights might mean. Anthropologists have, for in-
stance, qualified some of the more self-assured assertions of
globalization theorists that human rights are leading us to
a post-Westphalian, universal constitutional order (Held
et al. 1999:74). As Sally Engle Merry points out in this In
Focus, anthropologists are well situated to translate be-
tween global and local systems of meaning, an activity that

is critical to understanding the making of human rights
in the vernacular10 (Merry this issue). Merrys use of the
terms replication and hybridity allow us to better theorize
why human rights do not appear the same everywhere, and
they help us comprehend why translation is often a par-
tial, unpredictable, and haphazard process. Merrys ethno-
graphic study succeeds in identifying the elective affinities
between global human rights and particular social con-
stituencies, and in situating rights talk within the specific
sociocultural contexts and political frameworks in which it
is deployed.
To complement Merrys theoretical focus on symbolic,
linguistic, and discursive practices, ethnographic studies of
human rights might also concern themselves with state
centralization and pluralization; that is, with state legal and
bureaucratic institutions and how they are simultaneously
subjected to centralizing and pluralizing political pressures.
Pace Weber, we know that officials of modern nation-states
continually attempt to rationalize and institutionalize their
legal dominion. At times, government elites seek to achieve
this through top-down centralization (e.g., French colonial
rule in West Africa); in other times and places, they adopt
a set of pluralizing strategies that devolves powers to lo-
cal representatives (e.g., Baron Frederick Lugards policy of
indirect colonial rule in Africa).11 Although central state
rulers may have their plans, and although at times local
elites may collaborate with them to bolster their own posi-
tion (e.g., African chiefs in the context of British colonial
rule),12 more often than not state and local elites are locked
in a barely containable struggle, in which rulers endeavor
to centralize power and authority and local leaders strive
to create semiautonomous spheres of legal and political
jurisdiction.
In charting the regional politics of Mexican state cen-
tralization over the longue duree, Shannon Speeds article
illustrates how the universal rights promulgated in the In-
ternational Labor Organizations Convention 169 are trans-
formed at the point of contact in rural Chiapas, Mexico.
She locates her analysis of rights within the regions partic-
ular history of century-old peasant land struggles, one-party
Revolutionary Institutional Party (PRI) domination of state
and society, and the governments recognition of, and then
rejection of, collective land tenure. We might gain new in-
sights into recent attempts to establish indigenous rights in
Latin America if we think of them as pluralizing strategies
adopted by indigenous elites that employ the deceptively
novel language of human rights. The use of human rights
language, however, is the latest instantiation of a pattern
of political contestation between local and state actors that
stretches back to the beginning of colonial rule in coun-
tries such as Guatemala (Smith 1990) and Peru and Bolivia
(Stern 1987). These discussions are unquestionably an ex-
tension of long-established debates within colonial his-
tory, political anthropology, and historical sociology, and
an emergent anthropology of human rights could afford to
draw from prior insights into the operation of law and state
authority.
Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2392893
Wilson Afterword: Anthropology and Human Rights 79
LEGAL ANTHROPOLOGY, LEGAL REALISM, AND
KNOWLEDGE
Not all human rights claims are articulated within legal in-
stitutions or processes, but all are in some way oriented to-
ward changing or applying legal precedent. This means that
the study of human rights firmly situated within broader
discussions in politicallegal anthropology. Here, it is im-
portant to recognize that historically anthropologists did
not single-handedly invent a close ethnographic approach
to rights that situates law within a complex set of wider so-
cial institutions, patterns, and arrangements. In the 1930s,
legal realists such as Eugen Ehrlich (1975) broke with
the standard text-bound formalism of law schools and
their penchant for exegesis of the black letter of the law;
they chose instead to closely document and analyze how
lawyers, judges, clerks, plaintiffs, witnesses, and others ac-
tually negotiate legal rules in the courtroom and beyond.
Legal realism exerted a durable influence on the de-
velopment of legal anthropology in the 1940s, particularly
through the iconoclastic figure of Columbia Law School
professor Karl Llewellyn, who coauthored the classic 1941
anthropological study of Cheyenne law, Cheyenne Way, with
Franz Boass student E. Adamson Hoebel (Llewellyn and
Hoebel 1961). Since the 1940s, legal anthropologists have
elaborated, extended, reformulated, and transcended ele-
ments of the realist approach to law and rights. Along with
historians, they remain central to debates about law and
legality outside of Europe and North America.
If we examine the field of social scientists studying
human rights processes on the ground in Asia, Africa,
and Latin America, sociocultural anthropologists are clearly
overrepresented as compared to other disciplines.13 Take
the example of the South African Truth and Reconcilia-
tion Commission (TRC), which received significant inter-
national attention from scholars in social science, law, and
the humanities. In this case, anthropologists were among
the very few who stepped out of the official confines of
public hearings, formal statements, and press releases to
evaluate the significance of these things on the lives of
South Africans affected by political violence. Anthropolo-
gists, therefore, are still defined in part by the injunction
to get off the veranda (whatever the pitfalls), and their
finely grained studies of human rights processes have led
to a number of insights of both a theoretical and policy-
oriented nature. One key insight of the legal realists of the
mid20th century was fact skepticism, an approach that
directed attention to the difficulties that courts face in estab-
lishing the certainty of facts, considering the unreliability of
witnesses and the often unsystematic manner in which le-
gal investigators often go about gathering, presenting, and
analyzing different types of evidencebe they testimonial,
archival, material, or forensic.14
The insights of legal realists regarding the process
of knowledge creation have reappeared in anthropolog-
ical studies of courts, human rights commissions, and
truth commissions. In particular, researchers have drawn
our attention to courts and commissions overreliance on
80 American Anthropologist Vol. 108, No. 1 March 2006
positivist (i.e., statistical and forensic) methods for produc-
ing and evaluating evidence and for knowledge creation,
more generally. Before we review those anthropological
studies, it is vital to recognize the centrality of positivism
and scientific modes of knowledge creation in the operation
of state bureaucratic institutions, more generally. Therefore,
the positivism inherent in human rights epistemologies is
nothing unique.
Moreover, statistical and forensic techniques are vi-
tal to establishing a baseline of understanding regarding
past violations. There is a uniquely pressing impulse in hu-
man rights casesan impulse that is simultaneously polit-
ical, ethical, and historicalto establish who did what to
whom in conditions of great uncertainty. For instance, the
exhumation of mass graves by teams of forensic anthropolo-
gists following the massacre of over 7,000 Bosnian Muslims
at Srebrenica in 1995 was an indispensable part of coun-
teracting a torrent of denials by politicians and other apol-
ogists of the Republika Srpska (The alleged events didnt
happen, The events happened but werent as bad as oth- gists argued that a positivist approach to documenting the
ers have made out, Ok, many Muslim men were killed, but
they were killed in combat, and thats not illegal according
to the laws of war, etc.).
According to the International Criminal Court for
the Former Yugoslavia in the Krstic case, forensic analy-
sis demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that over 7,000
males were summarily executedthey were not killed in
combat as the Defense Counsel for General Krstic had
argued.15 Forensic research on the burial sites turned up
hundreds of blindfolds and ligatures used in the executions,
and a number of individuals were so physically disabled that
they could not have been combatants. Sociocultural anthro-
pologists seldom operate in the realm of beyond reason-
able doubt, but we need to remind ourselves that the aim of
courts in trying alleged perpetrators of mass crimes is to ver-
ify who committed criminal acts and to do so with enough
certainty that guilt or innocence may be determined.
Verification and accountability are not to be dismissed
lightly. Anthropologist John Borneman (1997) has argued
cogently and persuasively for establishing accountability
(understood as proportional retributive justice) and the rule
of law after decades of politically motivated authoritarian
criminality. Borneman (1997) focused on the transitions
from communism in Eastern Europe. He asserted that coun-
tries (such as East Germany) that had pursued retributive
justice and attempted to establish principles of account-
ability and the rule of law were less prone to criminality
and cycles of violence and revenge than countries (such as
Romania and the former Yugoslavia) that did not pursue
accountability.
Nonetheless, human rights courts and commissions of-
ten pursue many other kinds of objectives apart from ac-
countability, and this is where a positivist epistemology
may well reach its limits. For instance, the former Anglican
Archbishop of South Africa Desmond Tutu (1999) argued
that human rights commissions should respond sensitively
to the needs of victims of human rights violations, reassert
their dignity, and even reconcile them with the perpetrators
of crimes. Further, some have claimed that human rights in-
stitutions should write a new official version of the violent
past and undertake the making of a record which would
withstand the test of historyto quote Robert Storey, ex-
ecutive trial counsel at the 194546 Nuremberg trials.16
And yet, as Annelise Riles indicates in her article, a
number of anthropologists have expressed skepticism to-
ward the legalistic, instrumental, and technocratic incli-
nations of human rights practitioners. More concretely,
some anthropologists have criticized the overreliance of
human rights institutions on instrumental and positivist
approaches to knowledge and history. They criticize on
grounds that positivist methods have a tendency to exclude
the subjectivity of victims, perpetrators, and bystanders;
therefore, these methods can fail to adequately address cru-
cial questions of meaning and intentionality.17
In their studies of the South African Truth and Rec-
onciliation Commission (TRC), a number of anthropolo-
apartheid era suffered from two types of disjuncture. First,
Lars Buur (2001) noted a divergence between the scientific
formalism of the information system INFOCOMM and the
norms and actions of bureaucratic staff, which were charac-
terized by all kinds of inconsistencies and unintended con-
sequences. Second, there was a disjuncture between the sta-
tistical methods of the TRC data processors and the expe-
riential lifeworld of those people affected by apartheid-era
violence. This is not to discount the importance of statis-
tical information that demonstrated peaks in violence in
1976 after the Soweto uprising, during the declared state
of emergency in 1986, and in 1992 during a crisis in the
peace talks. The figures collected show a sharp rise in tor-
ture between 198488, thus lending support to the view
that torture became a widespread policy of the security po-
lice at that time. Yet in the absence of a wider historical and
political contextualization, statistics do not in themselves
explain the origins and causes of violence, why violence was
used as a political strategy by both state and nonstate actors,
or what the social and cultural consequences of widespread
political violence were for South Africans.
Both Buur (2001) and Wilson (2001) draw attention
to the difficulties in codifying and processing narrative
accounts using primarily statistical techniques, given that
personal memories are fluid, fragmented, fleeting, and in-
ternally complex. This is exemplified in the way that the
TRC defined and operationalized the category of victim:
The TRC Report listed 22,000 victims, but this number
excluded many other thousands of individuals on highly
debatable criteria. This categorical exclusion often resulted
from distinctions embedded within the coding formula of
the database, which dwindled from 200 categories of viola-
tion to less than 50 during the lifetime of the commission,
thus becoming successively more restrictive, narrow, and
arbitrarily selective.
Fiona Rosss (2002) study of women and the South
African TRC expands key elements of Buurs and Wilsons

findings, especially in noting how the commissions con-
cern with visible acts came at the expense of the silences
in communication, womens experiences of abuse, and the
everyday, mundane aspects of oppression under apartheid.
The silences in womens testimonies on abuse they them-
selves suffered were cultural (We are not allowed to ask our
husbands about politics in my culture [Ross 2002:58]), po-
litical (silence as a strategy of resistance against an apartheid
security police), and categorical (i.e., as a result of the fram-
ing and definition of human rights violation by the TRC
itself). As in both Buurs and Wilsons studies, the TRCs clas-
sificatory schema of victimhood and abuse rendered some
narratives, subjectivities, and experiences visible and others
invisible.
What emerges from these studies of state-sponsored
inquiries into mass human rights violations is a sense of
the limitations of available methodologies and epistemolo-
gies for a comprehensive understanding of what violations
meant for victims and, indeed, for perpetrators. They do
not mean that human rights violations are in some sense
radically unknowable, that all approaches to truth and fac-
ticity are doomed, or that scientific modes of inquiry do not
have their place. Instead, they point to the need for a more
systematic and satisfying integration of historical, interpre-
tative, and scientific techniques to simultaneously fulfill the
assortment of functions attributed to human rights courts
and commissions: to decide guilt and innocence, to write a
new historical account of past crimes, and to recognize the
dignity and worth of victims.
ANTHROPOLOGY, ANALYSIS, AND ACTIVISM
Goodale makes a constructive distinction between anthro-
pological approaches to human rights motivated by an
emancipatory activism and those that establish an analyti-
cal distance to undertake an ethnography of human rights
claims and their concrete consequences. Cowan draws on
the distinction between is and ought to reflect on the dis-
similarity between political scientists producing normative
frameworks and anthropologists constructing empirically
driven models of society. This distinction is valuable inso-
far as it captures different degrees of emphasis, but if taken
too literally, it can underestimate the extent to which indi-
vidual anthropologists may be committed to both norma-
tive and empirical projects simultaneously. Perhaps more
importantly, if overdrawn, the distinction might elide how
richly detailed ethnography studies of human rights institu-
tions and social movements can dialogically inform policy
and political engagement.
The detailed empirical analysis of the content and con-
sequences of various human rights projects allows us to
evaluate which human rights laws and discourses are more
likely to realize certain desired social and political goals, and
which might have unintended consequences or even neg-
ative outcomes. Closely observed studies of rights talk or
rights implementation therefore engender not a commit-
ment to an entire regime of rights tout court but, rather,
Wilson Afterword: Anthropology and Human Rights 81
contingent commitments to some formulations, method-
ologies, and politics of rights and not others, based on
an assessment of the available evidence. For instance, the
findings of critical studies of human rights epistemology, if
translated into practice, would require elevating the place
of victims subjectivity and testimony in court hearings or
before commissions of inquiry as well as improving ways of
integrating dissimilar valences of information (testimonial,
forensic, and statistical) produced through distinct method-
ologies.
Moreover, as comes through most clearly in Speeds ar-
ticle in this issue, various human rights goals may be con-
nected in ways that an integrated social analysis of rights
would complement and enhance. For instance, in interna-
tional criminal law, securing a conviction for the crime of
genocide requires dolus specialis, or special intent, defined as
a particular state of mind or a specific intent with respect
to the overall consequence of the prohibited act.18 Special
intent requires mens rea (Latin, lit., a guilty mind)an
awareness of how ones criminal acts fit into a systematic
and widespread policy or plan to destroy a group, in whole
or in part. For an act to be genocidal, there needs to be
a shared plan beyond the act itselfan ulterior motive
and an awareness of the genocidal consequences of the act.
Thus, for a court to meaningfully determine whether geno-
cide has indeed occurred, it has to have a clear sense of how
the alleged criminal acts fit into a general pattern of crim-
inal acts, the historical circumstances and context of the
acts, and the subjective state of the perpetrators and vic-
tims. This heightened concern on the part of international
tribunals for the subjectivity of perpetrators and the histor-
ical context of perpetrators actions has compelled legal of-
ficials to become more open to interpretative and narrative-
oriented approaches than is suggested by the earlier critics
of positivism.19
Anthropologists, both in their disciplinary insights into
the ideology of nationalism and their concern with hu-
man subjectivity, can have a great deal to say about inten-
tions, motives, and states of mind. They might also, when
not fighting internal and disciplinary turf wars, participate
jointly with other social researchers in the construction
of models of investigation that integrate rigorous scien-
tific inquiry and interpretative verstehen (lit., understand-
ing). Sociocultural anthropologists, myself included, have
been quick to provide trenchant critiques of what they per-
ceive as the unsophisticated epistemological infrastructures
of human rights commissions and courts, but rather slow
to provide the kind of guidance necessary to transform the
research and investigation procedures of human rights in-
stitutions. Of course, walking the tightrope of critical en-
gagement is perilous, but if anthropologists do not, there
are plenty of quantitative sociologists who will step into
the breach.
Anthropologists studies of human rights processes can,
in a number of ways, provide the missing link of criti-
cal feedback on human rights policies made in New York,
Geneva, or Mumbai. This could have clear implications for
82 American Anthropologist Vol. 108, No. 1 March 2006
how human rights are implemented. I am less pessimistic
than the other contributors to this In Focus who feel that
policy makers have ignored, and will continue to ignore, an-
thropological findings. This relative optimism comes from
nearly 20 years of interviews with human rights profession-
als in nongovernmental organizations, the United Nations,
and government agencies in Africa, Europe, and the Amer-
icas. A surprising numberI would estimate about half
have been familiar with anthropological studies of truth
commissions, indigenous rights, and questions of culture
and cultural rights more broadly.
The conversation between academic anthropologists
and human rights practitioners is barely more than a decade
old; it will continue to mature over time and it is unlikely
to be reducible to any single formula. Taking the long view,
this inconclusiveness is not to be decried. As I have argued,
human rights do not furnish a comprehensive moral and
political charter to resolve all questions of the common
good. Instead, after Jurgen Habermas (1987, 1992), they set
the baseline preconditions that allow for rational, meaning-
ful dialogue on the important political issues of the day.
R ICHARD A SHBY W ILSON Gladstein Chair of Human Rights,
Department of Anthropology, University of Connecticut,
Storrs, CT, 06268
NOTES
1. See Freeman (1995) for a summary of these debates. Within
anthropology, the reader will no doubt be aware of the robust ex-
changes provoked by Adam Kupers (2003) challenging of what he
sees as the myths of the indigenous rights movement.
2. Reebok Human Rights Foundation (n.d.). Shells (n.d.) position
on human rights is laid out at their corporate websites.
3. See Luban (2003) and Wilson (2005b) on the status of human
rights in U.S. foreign and domestic policy since 9/11.
4. See John Wallach (2005) on human rights as an ethics of
power.
5. And, of course, we must be perceptive to all the ways in which
local appropriations of human rights are about neither domination
nor resistance vis-a-vis the state but, instead, serve as an outlet
for the expression of local identities, intracommunal feuds, family,
personal conflicts, and so on.
6. Unless one accepts the self-contradictory premises of strategic
essentialism.
7. Despite its old-fashioned invocations of man and essences,
the historical materialist sentiments of Henri Lefebvre are directly
applicable here:
Abstract logical consistency theories divorced from social
activities and practical verification, have no value what-
ever. The essence of man is social, and the essence of soci-
ety is praxis-acts, courses of action, interaction. Separated
from praxis, theory vainly comes to grips with falsely for-
mulated or insoluble problems, and bogs down in mysti-
cism and mystification. [1968:34]
8. See, for instance, Slyomovics 2005 on the performance of hu-
man rights in Morocco.
9. Both Margaret Gilbert (n.d.) and Jennifer Nedelsky (in press)
have forthcoming books on human rights and their relationship
to common social behavior.
10. See also Merry (2003) for a discussion of vernacularization and
womens rights.
11. See Mann and Roberts (1991) for an excellent set of compar-
isons of British and French colonial rule and legal systems in Africa.
12. See Chanock 1991 on the close relationships between local
chiefs and British indirect rule.
13. Historians, although central to debates about law and espe-
cially colonialism and law, have by and large not made the leap to
studying human rights, with a few admirable exceptions such as
Kenneth Cmiel (2004).
14. See Cotterrell (1992:217).
15. Prosecutor v. Radislav Krstic, Case No. IT-98-33-T, Judgment
02 August 2001. See Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team (n.d.)
reports for Bosnia.
16. Mark Osiel (1997) has argued consistently that trials should
serve as a history lesson about the past and serve the ends of col-
lective pedagogy.
17. Some commentators on the hearings of the International Crim-
inal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia trials at The Hague have
been highly critical of how judges have received victim testimony,
especially from women speaking about rape and sexual violation,
see Dembour and Haslam 2004.
18. Prosecutor v. Radislav Krstic, Case No. IT-98-33-T, Judgment 02
August 2001. At 571.
19. Here, I am thinking of the historical accounts produced in judg-
ments of the two UN ad hoc criminal tribunals: the International
Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and the International
Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. See Wilson (2005a) for an elabora-
tion of this argument.
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