Dikshit Sarma Bhagabati (2023)

My research focuses on how the marginalised express their own sovereign enunciations of human rights law that militate against the dominant tenets of the state, international organisations, aid workers, and lawyers. Instead of always teaching the marginalised how to participate better in the civil society, perhaps those legally trained should also learn from them sometimes. To this end, my anthropological method seeks to displace law from its sanctuary in courtrooms and authoritative institutions to the humdrum of everydayness. I conceive of my fieldwork with the Brokpa people in the high Himalayas of India as a way of doing (postcolonial, jurisprudential, literary, ethnographic, and auto-ethnographic) critical theory. The point is to situate a liminality where our critiques of human rights law and its renewed contemporary importance can mutually converse rather than diminishing each other. In a sense, my research also engages with the broader political and ethical significance of universalities in today’s world—if at all they are possible, and if so, in what relation to localised or vernacular idioms of seemingly universal categories.