Mark Goodale
Biographic Data
| ID | 87381 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Mark Goodale |
| GIVEN NAMES | Mark |
| FAMILY NAME | Goodale |
| SIGNATURE | GOODALE M |
| AFFILIATIONS | George Mason University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3699-1251 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 64 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 286 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 57 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 7 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1998 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Commentary on Tobias Berger’s ‘Diversity in Translation
Of Crystals and Semiotic Slippage
The salares, or salt flats, of Bolivia are the site of the world's largest proven reserves of lithium Although different proposals were initiated over the decades, it was during the thirteen years under the Movement to Socialism (MAS) governments of Evo Morales when the state-directed lithium project began in earnest. This is an ambitious project with a num ber of important dimensions, including evaporation mining in the region around Uyuni; the …
Introduction
The introduction to this special issue, Contesting Transitions: New Directions in the Anthropology of Energy, Climate Justice, and Resource Imaginaries, takes stock of the current state of debate within anthropology and allied fields over the contradictions, slippages, and inequalities at the centre of the global energy transition. Across a wide range of critical case studies, the contributions underscore the importance of attending to what is be…
Lithium scale-making and extractivist counter-futurities in Bolivia
This article uses the ethnography of the prelives of lithium industrialization in Bolivia to contribute to wider debates - in anthropology and beyond - about the essentially contested nature of the green energy transition. Based on research conducted between 2019 and 2023, the article examines the topographies of production and sociopolitical mobilization that are entangled with Bolivia's state-controlled lithium project but which resist the vari…
Justice in the Vernacular
This article examines the far-reaching implications of Sally Engle Merry’s seminal multi-sited research on human rights measurement and monitoring. As she argued, human rights indicators, which form the basis for measurement, depend upon a highly elaborate, and largely obscured, process of commensuration. Through commensuration, complex social, legal, and economic phenomena are treated as variables that can be measured using statistical procedure…
Reckoning with Law—and with Legal Anthropology
I recently experienced one of those unsettling, context-imposing moments that cause the ground underfoot to feel suddenly loose, threatening to dissolve into quicksand – until, that is, the moment passes, as it inevitably seems to do. It happened during a university-wide lecture by Mark Williams, a professor of palaeontology at the University of Leicester and the Palaeontological Association's ‘exceptional lecturer’ for the academic year 2022–202…
Futures Fixed and Foreclosed
In considering the ways anthropological approaches to the future can help make sense of current debates around energy transition, it is important to understand that "the future" is not a singular temporal placeholder, a category that allows us to talk meaningfully about moments, or events, or epochs, or sequences of days, months, and years that might-or might not-be awaiting us. Even so, if the central paradox of the High Anthropocene is that we …
An anthropology of impossible futures
This guest editorial explores the intricate relationship between anthropology and the concept of impossible futures, focusing on the global push towards electric vehicles (EVs) and the lithium energy assemblage. Drawing inspiration from a lecture by palaeobiologist Mark Williams, a member of the Anthropocene Working Group (AWG), the author reflects on the Anthropocene epoch and the human-caused transformations of the earth. It examines the Europe…
The Anthropology of Moralities
Anthropologists have been keenly aware of the tension between cultural relativism and absolute norms, and nowhere has this been more acute than with regards to moral values. Can we study the Other’s morality without applying our own normative judgments? How do social anthropologists keep both the distance required by science and the empathy required for the analysis of lived experiences? The plurality of moralities has not received an explicit an…
The Oxford Handbook of Law and Anthropology
This book is a groundbreaking collection of essays that provides an original and internationally framed conception of the historical, theoretical, and ethnographic interconnections of law and anthropology. Each of the chapters in the Handbook provides a survey of the current state of scholarly debate and an argument about the future direction of research in this dynamic and interdisciplinary field. The structure of the Handbook is animated by an …
Decolonizing Human Rights
In his extensive body of work, Professor Abdullahi Ahmed An-Naim challenges both historical interpretations of Islamic Sharia and neo-colonial understanding of human rights. To advance the rationale of scholarship for social change, An-Naim proposes advancing the universality of human rights through internal discourse within Islamic and African societies and cross-cultural dialogue among human cultures. This book proposes a transformation from hu…
Oxford Handbook of Law and Anthropology
Reinventing Human Rights
A radical vision for the future of human rights as a fundamentally reconfigured framework for global justice. Reinventing Human Rights offers a bold argument: that only a radically reformulated approach to human rights will prove adequate to confront and overcome the most consequential global problems. Charting a new path—away from either common critiques of the various incapacities of the international human rights system or advocacy for the sta…
Timerendering
This article uses reflections on chronopolitical praxis during the period 2006-19 in Bolivia in order to make a more general contribution to the anthropology of time and temporalities. The article proposes the theoretical concept of 'timerendering' in order to examine the ways in which time emerged as a pervasive register that mediated and also deepened political, social, and ethnic conflict in Bolivia. After illustrating the mechanisms through w…
After International Law
This essay examines the ways in which anthropologists have tracked the rise and fall of international law after the end of the Cold War. It argues that anthropological research has made important contributions to the wider understanding of international law as a mechanism for social and political change, a framework for protecting vulnerable populations, and a language through which collective identities can be expressed and valorized. Yet, over …
Sally Engle Merry
I am grateful to the editors of the Journal of Legal Pluralism for asking me to offer some reflections on the contributions of Sally Engle Merry to the anthropology of law. Rather than a more tradi
Dios, patria, hogar
The article uses ethnographic research on rightwing anti-government movements in Bolivia conducted at the height of social conflict and cultural violence in 2008 and 2009 to reflect on the relationship between anthropological research, ethical commitment, and the politics of knowledge. The article first describes the epistemological and political contexts in which engaged anthropology emerged. It then considers how and why the author's research d…
Laura Nader. Laura Nader. Letters to and from an Anthropologist
Sally Engle Merry (1944-2020)
The UN at 75
This column reflects on the continuing relevance of human rights in the 75th anniversary year of the founding of the United Nations. Despite the background circumstances, which included the catastrophe of a recent world war, ongoing colonial violence, and the dawn of the nuclear age, the new international body adopted the language and ideology of human rights as the moral foundation for the new world order. 75 years later, amidst a global pandemi…
God, Fatherland, Home
The article uses ethnographic research on right-wing anti-government movements in Bolivia conducted at the height of social conflict and cultural violence in 2008 and 2009 to reflect more generally on the relationship between anthropological research, ethical commitment, and the politics of knowledge. The article first describes the relevant epistemological and political contexts in which engaged anthropology emerged as an important disciplinary …
Droits humains
Cette entrée passe en revue les principales contributions sur les droits humains du point de vue de l'anthropologie, en se concentrant sur les catégories suivantes : culture, pouvoir, épistémologie, plaidoyer transnational et engagement. L'entrée se termine par une réflexion sur les orientations futures de l'anthropologie des droits humains
Values without Qualities
This chapter discusses one of the most influential and totemic documents, the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), and reads it as a historical-literary text that is infused with, and shaped by, two pervasive rhetorical modes: pathos and mythos . The cultural and political process that led first to the call for a universal declaration of human rights, then the drafting of what became the UDHR, cannot be understood apart from the imm…
The Bolivia Reader
The Myth of Universality
This article reexamines one of the most enduring questions in the history of human rights: the question of human rights universality. By the end of the first decade after the end of the Cold War, debates around the legitimacy and origins of human rights took on new urgency, as human rights emerged as an increasingly influential rubric in international law, transnational development policy, social activism, and ethical discourse. At stake in these…
Reclaiming modernity
In this article I explore the emergence of complicated new forms of indigeneity in Bolivia over the last 15 years. I argue that although what I describe as a second revolution is under way in contemporary Bolivia, there is a danger that this revolution will be misread by scholars, political commentators, and others because of the prevailing tendency to interpret social and moral movements in Bolivia (and elsewhere) in rigidly neopolitical-economi…
Toward a Critical Anthropology of Human Rights
Some 17 years after the end of the cold war, the international and transnational human rights regimes that emerged in the wake of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights are at a crossroads. On the one hand, the political openings created by the end of the bipolar postwar world have allowed what Eleanor Roosevelt described as the curious grapevine of nongovernmental actors to carry ideas and practices associated with universal human rights…
"Introduction to "Anthropology and Human Rights in a New Key
In this "In Focus" introduction, I begin by offering an overview of anthropology's engagements with human rights following the American Anthropological Association's (AAA) 1947 "Statement on Human Rights." After offering a rereading of the Statement, I describe the two major anthropological orientations to human rights that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s, following several decades of relative disengagement. Finally, I locate the articles in relat…
In the Way of Development
In the Way of Development: Indigenous Peoples, Life Projects, and Globalization. Mario Blaser, Harvey A. Feit, and Glenn McRae, eds. New York: Zed Books, 2004. 362 pp
Ethical Theory as Social Practice
This article represents a search for a different analytical language through which anthropology can engage with human rights. This effort is intended to contribute to what is an expanding range of ways in which anthropologists conceptualize, advocate for, and critique contemporary human rights. Its central argument is that current ethnographic studies of human rights practices can be used as the basis for making innovative claims within human rig…
Dark matter
This article shines a critical light on a trend in anthropology that has both mirrored, and, not inconsequentially, shaped, a broader preoccupation with rights-making and rights-claiming as the foundational strategies behind what Karen Engle called the "elusive promise of indigenous development." The article uses recent ethnographies of legal implementation and state-capital appropriation to think more generally about the history of indigenous ri…
God, Fatherland, Home
The article uses ethnographic research on right-wing anti-government movements in Bolivia conducted at the height of social conflict and cultural violence in 2008 and 2009 to reflect more generally on the relationship between anthropological research, ethical commitment, and the politics of knowledge. The article first describes the relevant epistemological and political contexts in which engaged anthropology emerged as an important disciplinary …
Empires of Law
This article explores the idea that law has become newly constitutive in a postmodern transnational system in which modernity's classic polarities have become obscured, the discipline of late capitalism has become widely if partially internalized outside of institutional domains, liberalism's foot soldiers (rights, citizenship, nation statism, 'free' markets) have gained new forward momentum despite a period of supposed ideological hybridity desc…
The Myth of Universality
This article reexamines one of the most enduring questions in the history of human rights: the question of human rights universality. By the end of the first decade after the end of the Cold War, debates around the legitimacy and origins of human rights took on new urgency, as human rights emerged as an increasingly influential rubric in international law, transnational development policy, social activism, and ethical discourse. At stake in these…
The Globalization of Sympathetic Law and Its Consequences
Justice in the Vernacular
This article examines the far-reaching implications of Sally Engle Merry’s seminal multi-sited research on human rights measurement and monitoring. As she argued, human rights indicators, which form the basis for measurement, depend upon a highly elaborate, and largely obscured, process of commensuration. Through commensuration, complex social, legal, and economic phenomena are treated as variables that can be measured using statistical procedure…
Human values and moral exclusion
This article uses empirical data from the anthropology of human rights and the ethics of everyday life to examine the relationship between dominant value frames, moral action, and the rise of ‘counter-humanities’ in the form of cultural identitarianism, racial and class-based nationalism, apocalyptic theologies, and nativist populism. This article focuses, in particular, on the emergence and growing power of the value frame of human rights in the…
Introduction
The introduction to this special issue, Contesting Transitions: New Directions in the Anthropology of Energy, Climate Justice, and Resource Imaginaries, takes stock of the current state of debate within anthropology and allied fields over the contradictions, slippages, and inequalities at the centre of the global energy transition. Across a wide range of critical case studies, the contributions underscore the importance of attending to what is be…
A comparative study of land tenure, property boundaries, and dispute resolution
An anthropology of impossible futures
This guest editorial explores the intricate relationship between anthropology and the concept of impossible futures, focusing on the global push towards electric vehicles (EVs) and the lithium energy assemblage. Drawing inspiration from a lecture by palaeobiologist Mark Williams, a member of the Anthropocene Working Group (AWG), the author reflects on the Anthropocene epoch and the human-caused transformations of the earth. It examines the Europe…
Timerendering
This article uses reflections on chronopolitical praxis during the period 2006-19 in Bolivia in order to make a more general contribution to the anthropology of time and temporalities. The article proposes the theoretical concept of 'timerendering' in order to examine the ways in which time emerged as a pervasive register that mediated and also deepened political, social, and ethnic conflict in Bolivia. After illustrating the mechanisms through w…
Sally Engle Merry (1944-2020)
A Life in the Law
Legal Ethnohistory in Rural Bolivia
This article explores the intersection between documentary culture and social history through an analysis of legal archival theory and practice in rural Bolivia. The guiding theoretical premise is that legal archival research in rural Bolivia involves, to different degrees, both methodological and nonmethodological problems. The ethnohistorical researcher should identify,and distinguish between, the two in order to develop and pursue an effective…
Of Crystals and Semiotic Slippage
The salares, or salt flats, of Bolivia are the site of the world's largest proven reserves of lithium Although different proposals were initiated over the decades, it was during the thirteen years under the Movement to Socialism (MAS) governments of Evo Morales when the state-directed lithium project began in earnest. This is an ambitious project with a num ber of important dimensions, including evaporation mining in the region around Uyuni; the …
Lithium scale-making and extractivist counter-futurities in Bolivia
This article uses the ethnography of the prelives of lithium industrialization in Bolivia to contribute to wider debates - in anthropology and beyond - about the essentially contested nature of the green energy transition. Based on research conducted between 2019 and 2023, the article examines the topographies of production and sociopolitical mobilization that are entangled with Bolivia's state-controlled lithium project but which resist the vari…
Futures Fixed and Foreclosed
In considering the ways anthropological approaches to the future can help make sense of current debates around energy transition, it is important to understand that "the future" is not a singular temporal placeholder, a category that allows us to talk meaningfully about moments, or events, or epochs, or sequences of days, months, and years that might-or might not-be awaiting us. Even so, if the central paradox of the High Anthropocene is that we …
Dios, patria, hogar
The article uses ethnographic research on rightwing anti-government movements in Bolivia conducted at the height of social conflict and cultural violence in 2008 and 2009 to reflect on the relationship between anthropological research, ethical commitment, and the politics of knowledge. The article first describes the epistemological and political contexts in which engaged anthropology emerged. It then considers how and why the author's research d…
The UN at 75
This column reflects on the continuing relevance of human rights in the 75th anniversary year of the founding of the United Nations. Despite the background circumstances, which included the catastrophe of a recent world war, ongoing colonial violence, and the dawn of the nuclear age, the new international body adopted the language and ideology of human rights as the moral foundation for the new world order. 75 years later, amidst a global pandemi…
Olivia Harris (1948-2009)
Leopold Pospisil
A comparative study of land tenure, property boundaries, and dispute resolution
Association for Political and Legal Anthropology
Practicing ethnography in law
Practicing Ethnography in Law
Practicing Ethnography in Law brings together a selection of top scholars in legal anthropology, social sciences, and law to delineate the state of the art in ethnographic research strategies. Each of
Introduction
This volume is the result of a project in which ethnographers were asked to write essays that explored different research techniques that they have used to understand complex legal issues in a variety of social, political, and legal contexts. Each essay addresses a particular set of analytical problems that the ethnographers have confronted, or a particular type of data or research method that the ethnographer found useful. Because of its detaile…
The Globalization of Sympathetic Law and Its Consequences
Legal Ethnohistory in Rural Bolivia
This article explores the intersection between documentary culture and social history through an analysis of legal archival theory and practice in rural Bolivia. The guiding theoretical premise is that legal archival research in rural Bolivia involves, to different degrees, both methodological and nonmethodological problems. The ethnohistorical researcher should identify,and distinguish between, the two in order to develop and pursue an effective…
Association for Political and Legal Anthropology
Empires of Law
This article explores the idea that law has become newly constitutive in a postmodern transnational system in which modernity's classic polarities have become obscured, the discipline of late capitalism has become widely if partially internalized outside of institutional domains, liberalism's foot soldiers (rights, citizenship, nation statism, 'free' markets) have gained new forward momentum despite a period of supposed ideological hybridity desc…
A Life in the Law
The Spectacular City
The Spectacular City
The Spectacular City: Violence and Performance in Urban Bolivia. Daniel M. Goldstein. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004. 275 pp
Traversing Boundaries
Anthropology and the Philosophy of Human Rights
Anthropology Between Reason and Intuition
Anthropology and Human Rights-An Open Exchange
Traduire la paix et la violence
Reclaiming modernity
In this article I explore the emergence of complicated new forms of indigeneity in Bolivia over the last 15 years. I argue that although what I describe as a second revolution is under way in contemporary Bolivia, there is a danger that this revolution will be misread by scholars, political commentators, and others because of the prevailing tendency to interpret social and moral movements in Bolivia (and elsewhere) in rigidly neopolitical-economi…
In the Way of Development
In the Way of Development: Indigenous Peoples, Life Projects, and Globalization. Mario Blaser, Harvey A. Feit, and Glenn McRae, eds. New York: Zed Books, 2004. 362 pp
Ethical Theory as Social Practice
This article represents a search for a different analytical language through which anthropology can engage with human rights. This effort is intended to contribute to what is an expanding range of ways in which anthropologists conceptualize, advocate for, and critique contemporary human rights. Its central argument is that current ethnographic studies of human rights practices can be used as the basis for making innovative claims within human rig…
"Introduction to "Anthropology and Human Rights in a New Key
In this "In Focus" introduction, I begin by offering an overview of anthropology's engagements with human rights following the American Anthropological Association's (AAA) 1947 "Statement on Human Rights." After offering a rereading of the Statement, I describe the two major anthropological orientations to human rights that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s, following several decades of relative disengagement. Finally, I locate the articles in relat…
Toward a Critical Anthropology of Human Rights
Some 17 years after the end of the cold war, the international and transnational human rights regimes that emerged in the wake of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights are at a crossroads. On the one hand, the political openings created by the end of the bipolar postwar world have allowed what Eleanor Roosevelt described as the curious grapevine of nongovernmental actors to carry ideas and practices associated with universal human rights…
The power of right(s)
At the end of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's dizzyingly suggestive but frustratingly vague book Empire, the authors take the leap that we all know is coming, but which, given the heights that have come before, we anticipate with a certain amount of dread. After having described what they understand to be a new global socio-political configuration, and having shrouded their analysis in a kind of ominousness, given the fact that Empire emerges t…
The Practice of Human Rights
Human rights are now the dominant approach to social justice globally. But how do human rights work? What do they do? Drawing on anthropological studies of human rights work from around the world, this book examines human rights in practice. It shows how groups and organizations mobilize human rights language in a variety of local settings, often differently from those imagined by human rights law itself. The case studies reveal the contradiction…
Sociology (51 works) · Political science (44 works) · Law (42 works) · Philosophy (26 works) · Law (23 works) · Politics (23 works) · Anthropology (22 works) · Epistemology (20 works) · Human rights (17 works) · Environmental ethics (15 works)