Legalizing Human Rights in Africa Workshop #6

At this workshop, Mark Goodale will be delivering a talk entitled "Human Rights in an Anthropological Key." Mark is an anthropologist who specializes in legal anthropology, human rights and culture, comparative ethical practice and epistemology, the anthropology of morality, and conflict studies. He has been conducting research in Bolivia since 1996 and during 2003-2004 (as a Fulbright scholar) he studied Romania’s efforts to reform its political and legal institutions in preparation for accession to the European Union in 2007. He came to George Mason's Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution in the fall of 2003 after serving as the first Marjorie Shostak Distinguished Lecturer in Anthropology at Emory University. His Ph.D. is from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (2001).

He is the author of two recent books: Surrendering to Utopia: An Anthropology of Human Rights (Stanford University Press, 2009) and Dilemmas of Modernity: Bolivian Encounters with Law and Liberalism (Stanford University Press, 2008). He is currently at work on two new books: the first is an ethnographic analysis of sociopolitical change and the moral imagination in Bolivia based on three years of research funded by the National Science Foundation and the Wenner-Gren Foundation; the second is a volume of essays on human rights and moral creativity.