Back to top

Human Rites

Michaela, an African American dean at a major American university, summons Alan, a renowned professor of cultural psychology, in response to student protest over his controversial paper on female initiation rites in sub-Saharan Africa. But dormant feelings from an affair years earlier turn a heated argument over science and cultural pluralism into a knock-down, drag-out fight. Rozin's provocative play shatters the ivory tower of academia, upending questions of privilege and Western morality.

"What Do Human Rights Do? An Anthropological Enquiry"

In the torrent of reporting on human rights in recent years far more attention is given to human rights violations in the non-Western world than in Euro-America. How should we explain this imbalance? … [W]e should look at the variable functions of the nation state, the shifting structures of international power, and the moral languages in which injustice is identified and its elimination advocated.

The Burdens of Brotherhood: Jews and Muslims from North Africa to France

Headlines from France suggest that Muslims have renewed an age-old struggle against Jews and that the two groups are once more inevitably at odds. But the past tells a different story. The Burdens of Brotherhood is a sweeping history of Jews and Muslims in France from World War I to the present. Here Ethan Katz introduces a richer and more complex world that offers fresh perspective for understanding the opportunities and challenges in France today.

Citizenship, Inequality, and Difference

Citizenship, Inequality, and Difference offers a concise and sweeping overview of citizenship's complex evolution, from ancient Rome to the present. Political leaders and thinkers still debate, as they did in Republican Rome, whether the presumed equivalence of citizens is compatible with cultural diversity and economic inequality. Frederick Cooper presents citizenship as claim-making--the assertion of rights in a political entity.