Surrendering to Utopia

Surrendering to Utopia
Author: Mark Goodale
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2009-05-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0804771219

Surrendering to Utopia is a critical and wide-ranging study of anthropology's contributions to human rights. Providing a unique window into the underlying political and intellectual currents that have shaped human rights in the postwar period, this ambitious work opens up new opportunities for research, analysis, and political action. At the book's core, the author describes a "well-tempered human rights"—an orientation to human rights in the twenty-first century that is shaped by a sense of humility, an appreciation for the disorienting fact of multiplicity, and a willingness to make the mundaneness of social practice a source of ethical inspiration. In examining the curious history of anthropology's engagement with human rights, this book moves from more traditional anthropological topics within the broader human rights community—for example, relativism and the problem of culture—to consider a wider range of theoretical and empirical topics. Among others, it examines the link between anthropology and the emergence of "neoliberal" human rights, explores the claim that anthropology has played an important role in legitimizing these rights, and gauges whether or not this is evidence of anthropology's potential to transform human rights theory and practice more generally.

Utopia

Utopia
Author: Thomas More
Publisher: e-artnow
Total Pages: 105
Release: 2019-04-08
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 8027303583

Utopia is a work of fiction and socio-political satire by Thomas More published in 1516 in Latin. The book is a frame narrative primarily depicting a fictional island society and its religious, social and political customs. Many aspects of More's description of Utopia are reminiscent of life in monasteries.

Human Rights

Human Rights
Author: Mark Goodale
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 109
Release: 2008-10-20
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1405183357

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

Anarchy, State, and Utopia

Anarchy, State, and Utopia
Author: Robert Nozick
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 386
Release: 1974
Genre: Anarchism
ISBN: 063119780X

Robert Nozicka s Anarchy, State, and Utopia is a powerful, philosophical challenge to the most widely held political and social positions of our age ---- liberal, socialist and conservative.

If God Were a Human Rights Activist

If God Were a Human Rights Activist
Author: Boaventura de Sousa Santos
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 153
Release: 2015-04-29
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0804795037

We live in a time when the most appalling social injustices and unjust human sufferings no longer seem to generate the moral indignation and the political will needed both to combat them effectively and to create a more just and fair society. If God Were a Human Rights Activist aims to strengthen the organization and the determination of all those who have not given up the struggle for a better society, and specifically those that have done so under the banner of human rights. It discusses the challenges to human rights arising from religious movements and political theologies that claim the presence of religion in the public sphere. Increasingly globalized, such movements and the theologies sustaining them promote discourses of human dignity that rival, and often contradict, the one underlying secular human rights. Conventional or hegemonic human rights thinking lacks the necessary theoretical and analytical tools to position itself in relation to such movements and theologies; even worse, it does not understand the importance of doing so. It applies the same abstract recipe across the board, hoping that thereby the nature of alternative discourses and ideologies will be reduced to local specificities with no impact on the universal canon of human rights. As this strategy proves increasingly lacking, this book aims to demonstrate that only a counter-hegemonic conception of human rights can adequately face such challenges.

The Rise and Fall of Human Rights

The Rise and Fall of Human Rights
Author: Lori Allen
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 281
Release: 2013-04-24
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0804785511

The Rise and Fall of Human Rights provides a groundbreaking ethnographic investigation of the Palestinian human rights world—its NGOs, activists, and "victims," as well as their politics, training, and discourse—since 1979. Though human rights activity began as a means of struggle against the Israeli occupation, in failing to end the Israeli occupation, protect basic human rights, or establish an accountable Palestinian government, the human rights industry has become the object of cynicism for many Palestinians. But far from indicating apathy, such cynicism generates a productive critique of domestic politics and Western interventionism. This book illuminates the successes and failures of Palestinians' varied engagements with human rights in their quest for independence.

Dilemmas of Modernity

Dilemmas of Modernity
Author: Mark Goodale
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 374
Release: 2008-10-29
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0804769885

Dilemmas of Modernity provides an innovative approach to the study of contemporary Bolivia, moving telescopically between social, political, legal, and discursive analyses, and drawing from a range of disciplinary traditions. Based on a decade of research, it offers an account of local encounters with law and liberalism. Mark Goodale presents, through a series of finely grained readings, a window into the lives of people in rural areas of Latin America who are playing a crucial role in the emergence of postcolonial states. The book contends that the contemporary Bolivian experience is best understood by examining historical patterns of intention as they emerge from everyday practices. It provides a compelling case study of the appropriation and reconstruction of transnational law at the local level, and gives key insights into this important South American country.

Radical Utopianism and Cultural Studies

Radical Utopianism and Cultural Studies
Author: John Storey
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 235
Release: 2019-01-25
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1351782436

In Radical Utopianism and Cultural Studies, John Storey looks at the concept of utopianism from a cultural studies perspective and argues that radical utopianism can awaken the political promise of cultural studies. Between the Preface and the Postscript, there are seven chapters that explore different aspects of radical utopianism. The book begins with a definition of what radical utopianism means, with its productive combination of defamiliarization and desire. From there, it considers Thomas More’s invention of the concept of utopia with its double articulation of what is and what could be, Herbert Marcuse’s utopian rereading of Sigmund Freud’s concept of repression, Gerrard Winstanley and the Diggers, the Paris Commune, and the Haight-Ashbury counterculture. In the final chapter, Storey examines two versions of utopian capitalism: retro and post. Although the main focus here is on Donald Trump’s presidential election campaign and Paul Mason’s recent bestseller Postcapitalism, the chaper begins with a brief discussion of Karl Marx on capitalism. Each chapter, in a different way, argues that radical utopianism defamiliarizes the manufactured naturalness of the here and now, making it conceivable to believe that another world is possible. This book provides an ideal introduction to utopianism for students of cultural studies as well as students within a number of related disciplines such as sociology, literature, history, politics, and media studies.

Toward an Anthropology of the Will

Toward an Anthropology of the Will
Author: Keith M. Murphy
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2010-02-10
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0804773777

Toward an Anthropology of the Will is the first book that systematically explores volition from an ethnographically informed anthropological point of view. While philosophers have for centuries puzzled over the degree to which individuals are "free" to choose how to act in the world, anthropologists have either assumed that the will is a stable, constant fact of the human condition or simply ignored it. Although they are usually quite comfortable discussing the relationship between culture and cognition or culture and emotion, anthropologists have not yet focused on how culture and volition are interconnected. The contributors to this book draw upon their unique insights and research experience to address fundamental questions, including: What forms does the will take in culture? How is willing experienced? How does it relate to emotion and cognition? What does imagination have to do with willing? What is the connection between morality, virtue, and willing? Exploring such questions, the book moves beyond old debates about "freedom" and "determinacy" to demonstrate how a richly nuanced anthropological approach to the cultural experience of willing can help shape theories of social action in the human sciences.