Justice and anthropology Class notes

Week 4: Do humans have rights?

Ryan Schram

March 16, 2026

Week 4: Do humans have rights?

ANTH 3623: Reconciling justice with anthropology (Semester 1, 2026)
March 16, 2026

Main reading: Holcombe (2015); Levitt and Merry (2009); Merry (2006); Riles (2006)

Notes

In the 20th century, and certainly since the end of the second World War, one language has arisen as the main and most influential means for people to make political claims. In some ways, people have been required to use this language and claims made in other languages, based on other ideas and values, are rendered ineffective and illegitimate as a result. To claim political status, to acquire what one has been denied, has thus also meant being part of a single international system, of ideas if not of rules and institutions. It’s easy to dismiss liberalism as a form of Western neocolonialism, yet we should also note that the language of rights and citizenship is broadly compelling to many in many different situations, and its influence is hard to explain solely in terms as hegemony. The language of rights and citizenship is remarkably flexible too; people have adapted it to many different kinds of poltical struggle. What are people doing when they seek their “rights”? Are there “rights” (which given the wide range of things this applies to might be more than just freedoms) that all humans should have?

References

Holcombe, Sarah. 2015. “The Revealing Processes of Interpretation: Translating Human Rights Principles into Pintupi-Luritja.” The Australian Journal of Anthropology 26 (3): 428–41. https://doi.org/10.1111/taja.12152.

Levitt, Peggy, and Sally Merry. 2009. “Vernacularization on the Ground: Local Uses of Global Women’s Rights in Peru, China, India and the United States.” Global Networks 9 (4): 441–61. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1471-0374.2009.00263.x.

Merry, Sally Engle. 2006. “Transnational Human Rights and Local Activism: Mapping the Middle.” American Anthropologist 108 (1): 38–51. https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.2006.108.1.38.

Riles, Annelise. 2006. “Anthropology, Human Rights, and Legal Knowledge: Culture in the Iron Cage.” Cornell Law Faculty Publications, March. https://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/facpub/991.