Anthropology and Human RIghts

A good formulation for me as to how  research and field work might be used towards a critique of international HR law.

Frederic Megret – Where does the critique of International Human Rights Stand

"...In the effort to elucidate the actual meaning of human rights for those actors, it has never been more necessary to understand human rights anthropologically, as a social practice. Both mainstream human rights lawyers and critical ones have at times tended to operate at the level of the ideological superstructure, or of elite discourses about human rights major NGOs, intergovernmental organizations, at the expense of work more rooted in an observation of the actual uses of human rights. More than ever it seems what is needed is to answer the question "what do human rights do?"113 and to answer it in detail with an eye for the local and the idiosyncratic. The goal should be to better understand, from a legally pluralistic perspective, how rights are produced and reinvented by their holders.114 Anthropologists have considerably enriched our understanding of human rights by treating them as cultural practices and shown the benefits of a more grounded perspective to understand the potential and the constraints imposed by resorting to human rights language.115 Legal pluralism can also channel attention to non-­‐legal modes of norm production and the extent to which various forms of resistance, rebellion or civil disobedience are also at heart normative practices.116 ..."