During the past decade, the relationship between anthropology and human rights has been reinvented, if one judges by the academic output that explains and documents it (American Anthropological Association (AAA) 1999; Cowan, Dembour and Wilson 2001; Engle 2001; Goodale 2006a, 2006b, 2006c; Mamdani 2000; Merry 2003, 2006a, 2006b; Riles 2000, 2006; Wilson 1997; Wilson and Mitchell 2003). With this reinvention, the contours of traditional debates in international human rights law such as the tension between universality of human rights and cultural relativism, have also been transformed, although this not fully reflected in the dominant human rights scholarship produced within the legal academy. Anthropology used to be identified with a strong Herskovitsian defense of cultural relativism, as exemplified in the famous 1947 AAA statement against universal human rights (AAA 1947). That statement famously declared that “[s]tandards and values are relative to the culture from which they derive so that any attempt to formulate postulates that grow out of the beliefs or moral codes of one culture must to that extent detract from the applicability of any Declaration of Human Rights to mankind as a whole” (AAA 1947: 542). This emphatic Boasian pronouncement was based on an anti-colonial and anti-racist stance which, with the exception of many anthropologists, virtually no other social scientists shared at that time. After almost fifty years, the anthropology profession has turned almost completely around, according to the AAA itself, which adopted a Declaration on Anthropology and Human Rights in 1999 (AAA 1999) in which it purported to reconcile itself with the anti-activist and relativist implications of the 1947 statement.