New Book - Surrendering to Utopia by Mark Goodale

Surrendering to Utopia
Stanford University Press
 

"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."

Stanford University Press

"At a time of contrasting narratives about human rights, from irresponsible triumphalism to cynical pessimism, here is a book that masterfully guides us into the complexities of contextualized practices of human rights across cultures and national boundaries. It does this by powerfully engaging anthropology, a discipline that has been marginalized by human rights' conventional scholarship to the latter's greater loss. Thanks to Goodale's very persuasive argument the record is finally being set right."

Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Universities of Coimbra, Warwick, and Wisconsin-Madison