ABSTRACT
It is necessary to examine the curious history of anthropology’s ambivalent relationship to human rights for at least two reasons. First, this history illuminates certain basic dilemmas associated with the emergence of the postwar human rights project and the ways in which particular political and philosophical approaches to human rights became more powerful than other alternatives. Indeed, there is a distinct irony in the fact that a legal and ethical regime that was conceived in order to prevent or redress the violent assertion of illegitimate power within international relations itself came to be defi ned by subtle forms of power. The study of anthropology’s exile from the early and formative development of human rights reveals how this shift in function was possible. Although this is not widely appreciated, either within the wider human rights community or in academia, the exclusion of anthropology from the critical moments in the emergence of the postwar human rights system would have lasting consequences. As we will see, at mid-twentieth century anthropology had established itself as the preeminent source of scientifi c expertise on many empirical facets of culture and society, from law to kinship, from religion to morality.
