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Anthropology of human rights is a subfield ofsociocultural andlegal anthropology that studies how ideas of "rights" are made, circulated, and used in practice.[1] Instead of treating rights primarily as legal rules, it examines the languages, institutions, and everyday interactions through which claims abouthuman rights acquire meaning and authority. Research follows rights as they move across sites and analyze howpower relations shape who is heard, what counts as evidence, and which harms become visible.[2]
As an area of inquiry, it grew from post-World War II debates aboutuniversalism and culture into a consolidated program that couplesethnography with institutional and documentary analysis. Classic concerns withcultural difference are reframed through attention to how global norms are re‑expressed locally and how people come to inhabitrights‑bearing identities. Contemporary scholarship extends to governance arrangements beyond the state, including arenas where corporations, states, civil society, and philanthropies co‑produce human rights standards.
Human rightsanthropology examines how ideas of "rights" are created, adapted, put into action, and debated across differentsocial worlds. Rather than treating human rights as a fixedlegal doctrine, anthropologists approach them as a series of fluctuatingdiscourses and practices.[3]
Leiden University anthropology professor, Matthew Canfield, and human rights advocate,Sara Davis, argue that the concatenation ofperformances,meanings, andstrategies surrounding human rights is shaped byquotidian experience and therefore, best studied throughethnographic methods.[4] This perspective emphasizes how rights language interacts withlocal norms, how global standards are re-expressed in vernacular terms, and how participation in "rights arenas" (e.g.the mechanisms that implement human rights treatises) fosters new forms of political identity.[5]
The field's scope ranges from transnational institutions (UN bodies,NGOs,International courts) tocommunity forums andsocial movements. Much scholarship maps the "betweenness" of rights practice: how claims move ambiguously between the “global” and the “local,” throughnetworks as well as through themoral and legal imaginations of varied actors.[6] Mark Goodale, anthropology professor at theUniversity of Lausanne, believes this "betweenness" helps human rights anthropologists understand the unevendistribution of power and cautions against imagining human rights as simply "imposed from the top down" or "demanded from the bottom up."
Within this field, "human rights" are definedpragmatically and historically. Anthropologists analyze theinternational legal frameworks (e.g., theUniversal Declaration of Human Rights) alongside thestate institutions that enforce (orfail to enforce) rights. As cultural anthropologistTalal Asad notes, "only the state can enforce norms as the law...[h]uman rights depend on national rights," and the legal categories embedded in classic citizenship theory (civil,political,social rights) traveled into post‑1948 human rights through thisstate-centered genealogy.[7] Asad's framing underscores a core conceptual tension in human rights anthropology: the convergence between “rule of law" andsocial justice.
A second definitional strand treats human rights as an idiom of social justice mobilization, foregroundingethical restraint, humility toward multiplicity of definitions, and attention tosocial practice.UConn anthropology professor Sarah Willen describes this outlook in terms such as "emergent cosmopolitanism" and "well‑tempered"humanism, noting that within anthropology's own professional debates, human rights are framed as evolving rather than static concepts.[8] TheAmerican Anthropological Association’s 1999 Declaration on Anthropology and Human Rights explicitly states that understandings of human rights change as knowledge of thehuman condition develops.[9]
Other key analytical terms includeVernacularization (the translation of transnational norms into locally resonant idioms) andindigenization (the reframing of new ideas in terms of existing values).[10] Ethnographic research explores how such translation is done by "intermediaries," and how it can both enablemobilization and provokeresistance.[11] The focus on translation is not merelylinguistic: scholars show how rights discourse reconfiguresidentities andrelations to produce new individual and collective subjects who come to see themselves, and theirclaims, through the lens of rights.
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Some scholarship extends human rights anthropology's scope to newgovernance spaces (such as multistakeholder processes inglobal health, food, anddevelopment), where corporations,states,civil society, andphilanthropies co‑produce standards and channel resources. Here, researchers examine how participation shapes thesubjectivities, strategies, andmoral power of civil society actors, and how rights meanings are transformed in these hybrid arenas. This work retains the field's signature emphasis on relational power and ethnographic analysis of practice.[12]
At the level offirst principles, contemporary scholarship often reframes the classicuniversalism–relativism debate in terms ofrecognition. Drawing onsocial‑philosophical accounts, some anthropologists analyze how claims to dignity andpersonhood are enacted across the institutional spheres of intimacy ("love"), legality ("law"), and civil society ("solidarity").[13] This “recognition” lens maintains skepticism towardEurocentric universalists while showing how universalist aspirations are producedin situ through situated struggles, an approach that helps explain whydisenfranchised actors continue to use rights language in spite of its ambivalences.
In short, the anthropology of human rights occupies a distinctive niche: it extends core anthropological commitments to ethnography and context to thetransnational life of "human rights," while offering an alternative to doctrinal or compliance-centered approaches and to anthropologies that treat "culture" or "law" as bounded domains.[6]
Specialists generally trace the anthropological study of human rights to two intertwined lineages: (1) theintellectual genealogy of rights as an object of inquiry and (2) anthropology's own, often ambivalent, engagements with that object. On the first lineage,medieval historianWalter Ullmann has traced the emergence of the conception of rights topost-classical political thought inLatinChristendom, where "natural right" was rooted infeudal status andobligations defined by birth rather than in universal entitlements.
On the second lineage, an early and influential moment was the American Anthropological Association's (AAA) 1947 "Statement on Human Rights," drafted byMelville Herskovits and transmitted toUNESCO.[14] In response to the United Nations’ efforts to draft aUniversal Declaration of Human Rights just after WWII, they advanced amoral relativist position; the AAA recognizedhuman beings as one species and "ideas ofgood and evil existing in all societies, but it also argued thathow rights/morals are expressed or valued differs by culture. Herskovits warned that imposing one conception on another would be tantamount tocultural imperialism. The frameworkhas persisted for decades and sparked significant controversy, with many anthropologists later regarding the position as somewhat "embarrassing"[15] or "problematic."[16] Today's human rights framework is more global, as scholars and activists from many universities and learned societies have used it to push for recognition and change.[13]
In the late 1940s,Eleanor Roosevelt, who was Chair of theUnited Nations Commission on Human Rights until 1951, gave speeches envisioning a "curious grapevine"; she imagined theUniversal Declaration of Human Rights would travel "behind the walls of repressive states and ideologies, to reach those most in need of its protections." In his 2009 book,Surrendering to Utopia, Mark Goodale regards the former first lady's vision as both prescient and radical.[17] In a review of Goodale's book, Sarah Willen articulates Roosevelt's view as "prescient in its anticipation of the contemporary NGO-led transnational human rights networks, and radical in gesturing well beyond the international system from whence it came, a system withseventeenth-century origins toward a world that is...possibly evenpostnationalist."[8]
From the late 1980s through the 1990s, anthropology's stance shifted markedly. Scholars identify this period as a "re-engagement," marked by increasedfieldwork on rights claims and organizational change within the American Anthropological Association (AAA). Milestones included the AAA's 1990 investigative commission on BrazilianYanomami territory encroachments, the establishment of a permanent Commission for Human Rights (later the Committee on Human Rights), and, crucially, the 1999 Declaration on Anthropology and Human Rights, which repudiated the 1947 position and affirmed that understandings of rights evolve with knowledge of the human condition.[8] Commentators at the time described this as a "radical realignment" within U.S. anthropology and, in some contexts, a partial reconstitution of the AAA as a transnational human-rights actor.[8]
In parallel, ethnographic approaches consolidated what many now call an "anthropology of human rights." This work followed how rights were translated into practice in concrete contexts such as Fiji's use ofbulubulu reconciliation in rape cases underCEDAW review,Indian feminist activism reframingreproductive health as a matter of rights after the1994 Cairo conference, andBolivian indigenous movements articulating land and resource claims through human rights discourse alongsideMarxist idioms.[6]
By the mid-2000s, this intellectual turn was visible in core venues. In 2006,Richard Ashby Wilson published a special feature inAmerican Anthropologist entitled "Anthropology and Human Rights in a New Key", which situated itself as a follow-up to the Herskovits’ 1947 publication in a marked re-engagement between the disciplines.[18] The issue included Jane Cowan’s call to rethink “rights processes” as heterogeneous fields of subject formation,[19]Annelise Riles’ critique of the predominance ofinstrumentalist legal knowledge,[20] and Shannon Speed's argument for critically engaged activist research.[21]
Together, these essays highlighted both theemancipatory appeal and the risks of rights talk: its use by marginalized actors to contest injustice, but also its capture by governments and abusers for purposes anthropologists often reject. For example, in post-apartheid South Africa, bothCommunist Party members andconservative neoliberals celebrated the1996 Constitution’s rights provisions, a phenomenon Wilson used to illustrate how human rights could be embraced by ideologically opposed groups for divergent ends. The cluster also helped normalize attention to thetranslation and vernacularization of rights as conceptualized by American anthropology professorSally Engle Merry.[13]
From the 2010s onward, two trends stand out. First, critics like historianSamuel Moyn argued that contemporary human rights discourse had narrowed into a humanitarian moral project focused on individual suffering, increasingly decoupled from political emancipation or structural redistribution.[22] Second, other scholars such as German philosopherAxel Honneth, drew onrecognition theory to call for frameworks that explain why disenfranchised actors continue to use rights language despite repeated disappointments. For example, in Shannon Speed's 2008 ethnography inChiapas, different members of the sameindigenous community interpreted human rights in opposite ways. Despite this ambivalence, both sides still used the idiom of rights to argue over what it meant to be a "true Ch'ol subject."[13][23]
Institutionally, the field's consolidation is evident not only injournals andhandbooks but also inteaching programs and public debate. Review essays from the early 2010s noted the spread of human‑rights curricula and the discipline's sustained engagement with legal, philosophical, and socio‑legal interlocutors, signs Willen believes are indicators of a once‑reticent field becoming a durable,empirically-grounded subfield of anthropological inquiry.[8]
Anthropologists study human rights primarily through long‑term, multi‑sitedethnography that followsclaims, categories, and actors across community settings, NGOs, courts, and intergovernmental venues.Fieldwork pairsparticipant observation andinterviewing withclose analysis of meetings anddocuments in what Riles calls the "culture of legal knowledge," allowing researchers to observe how authority, expertise, and procedural norms are enacted in expert forums andtreaty‑body sessions.[20]
A distinctive technique is to "map the middle": tracing the translators,caseworkers, andadvocacy brokers who move ideas and grievances up and down between local and transnational human rights discourse. Human rights anthropologists also document howunequal funding relationships and state agendas shape those translation chains.[24]
Documents and metrics are treated asethnographic artifacts. Researchers read forms, case files, country reports, and indicator frameworks to show howquantification reorganizesmonitoring and re‑distributes influence toward those who design measures and control funding.[25] Human‑rights ethnography also extends into elite and expert settings through institutional and para‑ethnographic approaches, examining how lawyers, officials, and advocates appropriate social‑science tools.[26]
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Recent work in the anthropology of human rights has analyzed how harm is produced, managed, and made (in)visible across environmental, corporate, border, and national security regimes. South African authorRob Nixon dubbed such dispersed, delayed harmsslow violence: attritional damage whose casualties are difficult to assess,far in time from the original cause, and/or politically discounted. In his 2011 bookSlow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Nixon argues that this unique type of violence is "insidiously invisible," posing distinctive representational and advocacy challenges.[28]
In his 2015 bookThe Land of Open Graves, documenting theU.S.–Mexico border, anthropologist Jason De León examines how "Prevention Through Deterrence" functionallyoutsources lethality todesert ecologies. De León uses methods fromall four subfields of anthropology to describe a phenomenon he callsnecroviolence: post‑mortem harm that extends sovereignty’s reach onto migrant corpses viataphonomic processes (i.e. exposure, decomposition) that are socially organized by policy design. De León argues that depicting the desert "deathscape" renders visible a violence deliberately pushed out of public view.[27]
Corporate restructuring likewise figures in human‑rights ethnography. StudyingCoca‑Cola workers inColombia in 2006,Vanderbilt anthropology professorLesley Gill documented howneoliberallabor reforms and paramilitary violence fragment social relations, erode union protections, and generateimpunity, pushing trade unionists to build transnational alliances and to recast rights claims around economic security andgendered livelihoods. Drawing on the work ofMarxist geographer,David Harvey, Gill's account links corporate supply chains, state security practices, and selectiveanti‑union targeting to what she reads as "accumulation by dispossession," thereby situatinglabor rights within broader fields ofcoercion and market reform.[29]
InBolivia,Rutgers University anthropology professor, Daniel M. Goldstein, tracks the rise of citizen security as a rights‑inflected development agenda and explores its contradictory reception amongurban poor communities under and after theMorales government. While donors and policymakers frame "security" as a right enabling other rights, some residents experience rights discourse asexternally imposed and permissive of crime, legitimizingcommunity justice practices (including lynchings) that themselves raise human‑rights concerns.[30]
A parallel line of research examinescultural rights as collective entitlements that sometimes collide with individual, "basic" human rights. Working from Colombian cases,MIT anthropologist Jean E. Jackson analyzes the uneasy fit between state projects of multicultural recognition and local appeals to "rights to culture/difference," showing how both government actors and indigenouspueblos mobilize "culture" in disputes over jurisdiction, land, and membership.[31]
Taken together, these studies reposition the field toward forms of harm that are durational, post‑mortem, mediated by non-government actors, and increasingly securitized. Modern human rights anthropology foregrounds evidentiary labor, such as mapping political infrastructures that distribute risk and representational labor, such as how to render attritional damage and desert deathscapes legible.
