It was the “lack of perspective” in cultural relativism that troubled Gluckman (1965:251), the inability to identify “similarities in differences” (1965:254), that would allow for a more accurate understanding of what was specific in this case. To mark his intellectual debts, Gluckman dedicated his book to “Barotseland and Yale Law School lawyers,” moving away from the established hierarchy between informants in the field and academic colleagues (see Fabian 1983). A detailed ethnographic study of a particular judicial system was therefore more than the result of intensive fieldwork in Zambia. Gluckman understood universals as specific in their historical significance and therefore as the result of careful comparative work. In some respects, his understanding anticipated anthropologists` interest in twenty-first century “universals,” including the study of various activisms in the wake of human rights claims (see Tsing 2005). Whether on the other hand he anticipated an anti-anti-relativism in Geertz`s sense is debatable. To the extent that Geertz was identified with cultural particularism in his interpretative approach to anthropological knowledge (Keesing 1987), Gluckman was perhaps more systematically an anti-anti-relativist than Geertz himself. When Edmund Leach (for example, 1976) developed an interest in structuralism as a matter of deciphering the “grammar” of cultures, Gluckman saw a disturbing parallel to the division of humanity into mutually exclusive cultures in South Africa, his birthplace. Memorably, he noted that “in the remote isolation of King`s College, Cambridge, it was possible to focus on stubborn differences: it was not possible for `liberal` South Africans faced with the policy of segregation within a nation into which `others` had been brought and treated as different – and inferior” (1975: 29). In the Enlightenment, however, many thinkers spoke of “natural rights” with which every human being as an individual was naturally endowed.

This was supported by thinkers such as Thomas Paine, who argued that government could not violate such inalienable rights and that defending against such violations by the people was legitimate. As a result, this period led to the creation of documents such as the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789, which contributed to the discourse on human rights. The concept of human rights dates back to the Enlightenment. Although it may have origins prior to the Magna Carta of 1215, Magna Carta was limited, where, for example, the right to a free trial was only available to free men. Speed, p. 2006. At the interface of human rights and anthropology: towards committed activist research. American anthropologist 108, 66-76. What makes intimate human rights a topic of particular interest to anthropologists is not only the tendency to incorporate concepts of culture and tradition into these campaigns. In addition to being able to draw on the rich heritage of anthropological work on kinship, body and personality, these campaigns require other nuances in the study of human rights activism. Even though activists and lawyers may present themselves as entirely modern concerns, their preferred methods and meanings in affirmation were probably preceded by other avenues and coexist with them in formulating and making claims.

In India, for example, human rights activists` efforts to promote women`s reproductive rights – in their ability to determine their fertility, body and birth – use different language depending on who is being addressed (Heitmeyer & Unnithan 2015). While universal reproductive rights may be the language used for claims to the state, family and religious contexts require other strategies to make claims heard. Comparative questions here include how this plurality of demands works in countries where civil society activism has weaker roots than in India, and where activists, as in Malawi and Tanzania, may view the communities they claim to work for with thinly veiled condescension. It is incumbent upon anthropologists in such situations to follow the ethnographic imagination wherever it takes them, perhaps even away from the worlds of transnational human rights activism and into popular media such as radio (Englund 2011). Once considered a topic of little interest to cultural anthropologists, human rights became a focal point of growing anthropological concern in the 1990s and 2000s. Important publications now number in the hundreds, even if (like this article) they are limited only to the work of cultural anthropologists (not forensic anthropologists) that relate directly to human rights (and not to relevant works but contain only occasional mention of human rights). As Annelise Riles wrote in her article “Anthropology, Human Rights, and Legal Knowledge: Culture in the Iron Cage” (Riles 2006, p. 53, cited in International Legal Epistemology), anthropologists have “moved from treating human rights doctrines, actors, and institutions as instruments (for example, as instruments of advocacy on behalf of indigenous peoples) to treating them as subjects of ethnographic research. at eye level with other ethnographic subjects.” What was a discussion of anthropology and human rights has thus evolved into a research subfield that offers anthropology of human rights, which offers field investigations into site- and time-specific encounters between proponents of human rights universalism (a term coined by Mark Goodale in Goodale 2009, cited under General Overviews) and different communities suffer from man-made harm. Whether current anthropological research focuses on human rights as a practice or as a discourse, their common signature is to highlight local, national and international political and economic processes that integrate human rights and broader social justice projects. Two publications published in 1997 marked a turning point in the development of new forms of anthropological engagement in favour of human rights.

First, Richard Wilson`s contribution, Human Rights, Culture and Context (Wilson 1997, cited as General Overviews), anticipated research and writing on both human rights practice and discourse. The other, a special issue of the Journal of Anthropological Research on Human Rights, edited by Carole Nagengast and Terence Turner, articulates a new vision of the relationship between culture and human rights, not as an argument against ethical universals, but as an argument for integrating ethics into the overall way of life of each human group (see Hatch 1997, Messer 1997 and Nagengast 1997, all cited under Advantages and disadvantages of cultural relativism; and Turner, 1997, cited under Cultural Rights).