Surrendering to Utopia: An Anthropology of Human Rights

Goodale, Mark

ISBN 10: 0804762139 / ISBN 13: 9780804762137

Published by Stanford University Press, 2009

About this Item

Pages can have notes/highlighting. Spine may show signs of wear. ~ ThriftBooks: Read More, Spend Less.

Seller Inventory # G0804762139I3N00

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Surrendering to Utopia: An Anthropology of Human Rights
• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Publication Date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0804762139
• ISBN 13: 9780804762137
• Binding: Paperback
• Condition: Good
• Dust Jacket Condition: No Jacket
• Weight: 0.73 pounds

About this title

Synopsis

Surrendering to Utopia is a critical and wide-ranging study of anthropology's contributions to human rights. Providing a unique window into the underlying political and intellectual currents that have shaped human rights in the postwar period, this ambitious work opens up new opportunities for research, analysis, and political action. At the book's core, the author describes a "well-tempered human rights"—an orientation to human rights in the twenty-first century that is shaped by a sense of humility, an appreciation for the disorienting fact of multiplicity, and a willingness to make the mundaneness of social practice a source of ethical inspiration. In examining the curious history of anthropology's engagement with human rights, this book moves from more traditional anthropological topics within the broader human rights community—for example, relativism and the problem of culture—to consider a wider range of theoretical and empirical topics. Among others, it examines the link between anthropology and the emergence of "neoliberal" human rights, explores the claim that anthropology has played an important role in legitimizing these rights, and gauges whether or not this is evidence of anthropology's potential to transform human rights theory and practice more generally.

About the Author

Mark Goodale is Professor of Cultural and Social Anthropology at the University of Lausanne and Series Editor of Stanford Studies in Human Rights. He is the author or editor of eleven books, including Anthropology and Law: A Critical Introduction (NYU Press, 2017), Human Rights Encounters Legal Pluralism (ed. with Eva Brems and Giselle Corradi, Hart, Oņati International Series in Law and Society, 2016), Neoliberalism, Interrupted: Social Change and Contested Governance in Contemporary Latin America (ed. with Nancy Postero, Stanford, 2013), Human Rights at the Crossroads (ed., Oxford, 2012), Mirrors of Justice: Law and Power in the Post-Cold War Era (ed. with Kamari Maxine Clarke, Cambridge, 2010), Human Rights: An Anthropological Reader (ed., Blackwell, 2009), Dilemmas of Modernity: Bolivian Encounters with Law and Liberalism (Stanford, 2008), and The Practice of Human Rights: Tracking Law Between the Global and the Local (ed. with Sally Engle Merry, Cambridge, 2007).