I have not in the past had any impulse to take up issues of justice or rights in my anthropological work. My lack of interest on this score did not follow from an absence of personal concern about these matters, but was rather rooted in my sense that it is difficult if not impossible to talk about universally binding norms of justice without losing the distinctive tenor of the specifically anthropological voice. That voice, traditionally attuned to cultural differences and the integrity of local standards, tends to abandon what I take to be its better self in conversations on universal values. This need not always be the case. Indeed, I take the controversial American Anthropological Association Executive Board Statement on Human Rights to be an admirable attempt to speak to the issue of universal human rights in a uniquely anthropological way (Executive Board, 1947). The fact that this statement is held in little esteem today by anthropologists, however, and that it is held in even lesser regard by individuals outside the discipline, indicates that its confident, even brave (given the immediate postwar context of its composition), relativism has had little positive impact on broad discussions of the nature of justice and rights in the academy or beyond (cf. Goodale, 2006: 1–2; Merry, 2003). It appears, then, that the kind of openness to the value of relativism as a position from which to think about social possibilities and to keep a critical eye on our own settled pieties that stands at the foundation of my understanding of anthropology as a discipline has proven a nonstarter in the world of justice and rights – and this is why I have until this point shied away from addressing these topics.