Annelise Riles

In this article, Riles draws on ethnography in the particular zone of engagement between anthropologists, on the one hand, and human rights lawyers who are skeptical of the human rights regime, on the other hand. She argues that many of the problems anthropologists encounter with the appropriation and marginalization of anthropology’s analytical tools can be understood in terms of the legal character of human rights. In particular, discursive engagement between anthropology and human rights is animated by the pervasive instrumentalism of legal knowledge.