This innovative reader brings together key works that demonstrate the important and unique contributions anthropologists have made to the understanding and practice of human rights over the last 60 years.

• 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

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).