Preface

One of the significant recent findings of legal anthropology is that institutions of world governance can only really be understood when considered as producers of their own distinct knowledge and practice. At the same time, it seems clear that ideas about world order produced within these institutions are being taken up in local settings by people and organizations that see in them new possibilities for political leverage and self-determination, correctives to their marginalization by states. Legal anthropology in the era of human rights thus faces the challenge of determining how global concepts of rights and identity are navigated and shaped in practice by those who see themselves as the subjects of rights. Between these foci on the institutions of global governance and the local settings of rights claimants is the problem of legal norm diffusion, a key issue that helps to define the sub-discipline of legal anthropology.

My approach to this issue, which has turned out to be the central impetus behind this book, involves making a case for including within the central subject matter of anthropology the influence of actors often referred to as “the public” or as I prefer, “publics,” groups of actors who are impersonally connected and therefore unknowable through the usual methods of ethnography. Publics are the abstract, invisible intended audiences of outreach engaged in by those with very tangible grievances. And the ideas held by publics do matter, not just because of their possible influence on those who hold power, but because of the possibility that publics themselves might be influenced by claimants of rights. This in itself encourages the repositioning of local knowledge and identities toward their public consumers, bringing about largely unexamined dynamics to the recovery and representation of collective selves.