• Draws on a range of intellectual and methodological approaches to reveal both the ambiguities and potential of the postwar human rights project
• Brings together essays by both contemporary luminaries and seminal figures to provide a rich introduction to the subject
• Supplemented with selected international human rights documents and links to websites on human rights

"Provides an important introduction to core epistemological, moral, and methodological questions at stake. ... Recommended reading not just as background literature for students of the field, but for the wider anthropological community seeking to come to terms with rights." (Social Anthropology, January 2010)

"Goodale has an apt sense of what is important and what has yet to be done in the anthropological encounter with human rights ... .The book raises valuable questions not only about human rights but ultimately about cultural relativism, the concept of culture, and the practice and future of anthropology itself." (Academici, April 2009)

"The book draws on a range of intellectual and methodological approaches to explore both the ambiguities and potential of the postwar human rights project." (Law & Social Inquiry, Spring 2009)

Mark Goodale is Assistant Professor of Conflict Analysis and Anthropology at George Mason University and the Series Editor of Stanford Studies in Human Rights. He is the author of Surrendering to Utopia: An Anthropology of Human Rights (Stanford UP, 2009) and Dilemmas of Modernity: Bolivian Encounters with Law and Liberalism (Stanford UP, 2008) and coeditor (with Sally Engle Merry) of The Practice of Human Rights: Tracking Law Between the Global and the Local (Cambridge UP, 2007).