Month: April 2015

Thursday May 7 from 16.00–18.00
Auditorium 35.01.06, building 35 at the Faculty of Social Sciences (CSS), University of Copenhagen

“THE WORLD AS IT IS AND THE WORLD AS IT WANTS TO BE”

Abstract:
This talk will use insights from the anthropology of human rights to reflect more generally on current debates in Denmark and more widely about the possibilities for intercultural moral understanding. The talk will draw from the ethnography of human rights in order to develop a framework of inter- and transcultural engagement that samples theoretically from Erich Fromm’s argument for normative humanism, Isaiah Berlin’s emphasis on a non-relativist form of pluralism, and James Scott’s classic study of the relationship between resistance and power. The goal is to explore how the work of anthropologists—in dialogue, as always, with a diverse mix of theorists and case studies—can point the way to what Fromm called a more “sane society.”

Biography:
Mark Goodale is an anthropologist, sociolegal scholar, and social theorist. In 2014, after ten years on the faculties of George Mason University and Emory University in the United States, he was appointed to a chair at the University of Lausanne, where is now Professor of Cultural and Social Anthropology. He is the founding Series Editor of Stanford Studies in Human Rights and the author or editor of ten books, including Neoliberalism, Interrupted: Social Change and Contested Governance in Contemporary Latin America (with Nancy Postero, Stanford UP, 2013), Human Rights at the Crossroads (Oxford UP, 2012), Surrendering to Utopia: An Anthropology of Human Rights (Stanford UP, 2009), Dilemmas of Modernity: Bolivian Encounters with Law and Liberalism (Stanford UP, 2008), and The Practice of Human Rights (with Sally Engle Merry, Cambridge UP, 2007). His writings have appeared in, among others, Current Anthropology, American Anthropologist, and American Ethnologist, and he is the author of the chapter on human rights in Blackwell’s Companion to Moral Anthropology (2013) and the chapter on law in Blackwell’s Companion to Latin American Anthropology (2008). He is currently working on a number of new projects, including a critical introduction to anthropology and law and an ethnography of revolution, folk cosmopolitanism, and disenchantment in Bolivia based on several years of research funded by the US National Science Foundation and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research.