The Complexity of Human Rights: From Vernacularization to Quantification [Hardcover]

This book provides the first systematic assessment from a human rights law perspective of the landmark contributions of the renowned legal anthropologist, Sally Engle Merry.

What impact does over-simplification have on human rights debates? The understandable tendency to present them as a single, universal, and immutable concept ignores their complexity and by extension only serves to weaken them.

Merry and her colleagues transformed human rights thinking by highlighting the process of 'vernacularization', which sees rights discourse as being unavoidably dependent upon translation and interpretation. She also warned of the pitfalls of excessive reliance upon statistical and other indicators, through the process of quantification. Here the leading voices in the field assess the significance of these contributions.

1. Introduction
Philip Alston

PART I: VERNACULARIZATION AND HUMAN RIGHTS

2. A Very Murky Process: Embracing the Indeterminacy of International Justice and Human Rights
Richard Ashby Wilson
3. Vernacularization as Anthropological Ethics
Mark Goodale
4. Vernacularizing Rights: Indispensable but Dangerous
Jack Snyder
5. Globalizing the Indigenous: The Making of International Human Rights from Below
C?sar Rodr?guez-Garavito
6. Rites of Culture: Legal Frameworks, Indigenous Protocols, and the Circulation of Culture in Australia
Fred Myers
7. The Vernacularization of Transitional Justice: Is Transitional Justice Useful in Pre-conflict Settings?
Pablo de Greiff
8. Human Rights Don't Travel by Boat: Responding to Koskenniemi's Critique of Rights
Philip Alston

PART II: QUANTIFICATION AND HUMAN RIGHTS

9. Beyond the Vanishing Point: Quantificatiolã»