Contemporary perspectives on Human Rights from Social Anthropology

Human Rights have become a legitimate and almost universally recognized instrument, they have spread throughout all latitudes and have become an ordinary language among different population sectors, regardless of their origins. Dealing with Human Rights, anthropologists have glimpsed the importance of shifting attention from the global legal regime, towards the study of the modes of operation of legal-administrative institutions, as well as towards the forms of their appropriation by social agents. In this article we address the causes of the success of human rights language, we analyze the limitations of a merely legal approach and the forced reorientation of the theme towards "the social life of rights". We finally propose lines of research that highlight the contributions of ethnography to the subject.