Introduction

This volume contains selected chapters from the proceedings of the annual conference of the Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and Commonwealth, held at the University of Sussex in March 2001. The title of the conference was ‘Rights, Claims and Entitlements’ and its aim was to understand, from an anthropological perspective, the consequences of the recent rise of rights talk and rights institutions in both global and local politics. The anthropology of human rights and citizenship has been a growing field of anthropological enquiry since the mid-to late 1990s, and the conference represented an attempt to bring together and consolidate the research of social and cultural anthropologists from around the world, including contributors from Europe, North America, India and South Africa.