Материал: Nigel Rapport, Joanna Overing, Social and Cultural Anthropology - The Key Concepts (2000)

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by Melville Herskovits), it is upon ‘a respect for cultural differences’ that respect for all other social and individual differences should be based (1947:541).

The logics of human rights

A number of ideal-types of ‘competing normative logics’ (Falk 1980) concerning human rights may be identified. For much of the past two centuries in the West, the prevailing logic has been what might be termed ‘statist’. That is, nation-states have demanded the right to their own sovereignty and their own juridical and political equality; as such, the rights of their citizens are internal or domestic matters, and it is outwith the prerogative of members of other states to intervene. Statist logic was a development out of ‘hegemonic’ logic.This is the reasoning that ‘virtue’ is a manifestation of power, ‘might is right’, and it is the right of the more powerful to interfere in the affairs of the less powerful so as to maintain their interests and their (more virtuous) version of right. In its turn, however, statist logic has had to vie for its privileged position, in political debate of recent decades, with a number of other logics.There is a ‘supra-national’ logic, which lodges judgement of rights with institutions such as the United Nations, NATO, or the European Union; it is they now which claim the power to determine the rightness of states.There is also a ‘transnational’ logic pertaining to non-state, nongovernmental organizations such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, or the Worldwide Fund for Nature, which yet claim the right to monitor behaviour on a global scale whoever the protagonist. Then again, there is a ‘populist’ logic which rejects the necessary authority of states—if not all such self-perpetuating institutions—and seeks to derive rights instead directly from ‘the people’; this might span a range of manifestations, from Bertrand Russell’s pacifist War Crimes Tribunal to fundamentalist and terroristic organizations such as The Red Brigades or Hizbollah. Finally, there is what Falk refers to as a ‘naturalistic’ logic of rights, claiming that they inhere in human nature and therefore should be recognized universally and take precedence over all other (institutional) claims.

While the longevity of the above logics may be placed in a historical framework, it is important to recognize that all continue to contest for space and allegiance on a world-political stage today. And while the criteria for distinguishing between their appeals are many, perhaps the crucial one for present purposes concerns the units in which they see rights as inhering and to which harm can be done: from groups and collectivities on the one hand to persons and individuals on the other.As

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an ideal-type, statist logic sets out to protect collectivities from infringements against their rights while naturalistic logic is focused on individuals.This distinction then correlates with a further important one, that between relativism (statist) and universalism (naturalistic).

Human rights and anthropological relativism

Inasmuch as anthropology has seen its pedagogic mission as the furtherance of respect for ‘other cultures’—has argued for the rights to cultural difference, and posited cultural differences as the grounds for all others—it can be seen to have adopted a collectivist and relativistic logic. The thinking behind anthropological relativism is well rehearsed (cf. Crawford 1988; Downing and Kushner 1988). It is said that ethnography evinces no universal notion of humanity, and no commonality among those notions that do exist concerning the distribution of rights, duties and dignity. It is further said that there is no universal ‘individual’—that unified human subject with a knowable essence whom a naturalistic logic posits as the bearer of rights—only socially constructed persons. Those notions of ‘human nature’ and of ‘rights’ which derive from the fact of being human are historically and culturally bounded, it is argued; there can be no essential characteristics of human nature or rights which exist outside a specific discursive context. In particular, the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 was a charter of European, post-Enlightenment, liberal—humanist and idealist, political philosophy which came to be formulated in the wake of the Second World War and the Holocaust. It can be seen as a continuation of Kantian attempts to establish an Archimedean point that provides rational foundations for universal norms of justice; and it must be understood as part-and-parcel of the rise of capitalism—a means for individual profiteering enterprises to proceed unencumbered by communitarian obligations, traditional custom or a localized morality. In its application—in Western interference in moral issues internal to other cultures—the Universal Declaration has been responsible for a particular normative blindness towards indigenous peoples and their collectivist narratives of land ownership, political determination, selfhood and so on. Meanwhile, Western governments, such as that of the USA, feel free to pull out of UN bodies, such as UNESCO, when they feel too much emphasis is being placed on collective rights of peoples; a strengthening of group interests at the expense of the human rights of individuals is decried as the so-called ‘socialist bias’ of non-democratic societies.

But then what are the so-called human rights and freedoms of individuals as distinct from rights which people practise in the context of

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cultural, national and spiritual communities? To enjoy individual human rights requires community rights; individual rights cannot be exercised in isolation from the community—individual rights to join a trade union or to enjoy their culture, for instance, necessitate rights of groups to preserve their trade unions or their culture. Even in a laissez-faire Western democracy, individual rights are not absolute or immutable: they are balanced by the rights of others and by the interests of society, so that freedom of expression, of association and assembly, for example, are subject to the maintenance of national security, public order, and health and morals. In short, removed from his communities, ‘man loses his essential humanity’ (Moskovitz 1968:169–70).

Hence, the truly anthropological proposition that cultural rights have been implicit in any other rights from the start. Furthermore, if there is today a demand or a desire for anthropology to exercise ethical judgements, then this need not be paralysed by an appreciation of cultural relativism. The latter simply demands that such judgements always be made in cultural contexts and take account of the local habitus. Rights cannot be seen as anything but particular cultural forms, and notions of human rights as somehow existing outside or beyond distinct cultural realms is logically and empirically impossible.

Nonetheless, most if not all societies have propositions concerning some rights or others, however differently they might be perceived and formalized, and the claims operationalized. Hence, one can say with anthropological accuracy that human rights propositions invoke claims to specific goods and privileges by specific groups in specific places and times. Moral judgements, similarly, pertain to particular socio-cultural contexts; European genocide is not equivalent to tribal head-hunting or infanticide, cannibalism or feuding, because questions of violence must relate to cultural logic, technology and scale.

More generally, anthropologists can support a devolution of power to less powerful yet culturally distinct groups, and advocate their being given fair treatment before the law, towards the aim of maintaining if not increasing cultural diversity. Anthropologists can support the rights of groups to reproduce their own culture, and argue that this be seen to be as fundamental as the right to genetic transmission. One might describe a right of Third World peoples currently to express themselves in nationalistic terms, for instance; in their so-called ‘third generation rights’ (cf. Prott 1988) are expressed collective assertions of the right to self-determination, to protection from genocide, to permanent sovereignty over natural resources, to socio-economic development and to peace and security which grow out of the senses of group solidarity of various Third World populations.

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A variety of cultural logics might give onto a variety of notions of ‘human rights’, in short, but anthropologists can still support and defend the universal rights of cultures to those logics as such. Cultural relativism is after all based on the universalism that cultures are the foundational human right.

An alternative anthropology of rights

Equally well rehearsed are the arguments against relativistic thinking in anthropology. It has morally nihilistic, politically conservative and quietist consequences. It is also imbued with a relativistic meta-narrative concerning cultural difference which is logically inconsistent; for, cultural relativism must also include the relativity of the concept of ‘cultures perse (cf. Gellner 1993).

It further implies a modelling of society and of culture which many would now see as outmoded.That is, society and culture are depicted as sui generis: as reified and as ontologically secure. They are modelled as entities not processes: hermetically discrete and internally integrated; the basis of all similarities and differences between people, the ground of their being, the bank of their knowledge. This illusion of holism might have been legitimate currency in nineteenth-century nationalism and in Durkheimian sociology (cf. Barth 1992), but it is of little account in contemporary existential contexts. Mechanistic, social-structural notions of society and culture as organically functioning wholes must now give way to notions of human groupings as purposive and contingent political entities (ethnicities, religiosities, localisms, occupational lobbies) which live on as sets of symbols and interpreted meanings in the minds of their members. As Wilson sums up, ‘bounded conceptions of linguistic and cultural systems’ are out of place in a context where ‘culture’ may be characterized as ‘contested, fragmented, contextualised and emergent’ (1997:9).

In this situation, ‘culture’ cannot be raised as a right-bearing entity over and against human individuals. Individuals may have rights to cultural attachment and belonging, rights to membership of one or more cultures (of their choosing), but cultures do not have rights over individuals or members. Hence, on this view, ‘female circumcision’ is a violation of: (a) the right to freedom from physical and psychological abuse, (b) the right to corporal and sexual integrity, and (c) the right to health and education (Boulware-Miller 1985:155–77). More generally, the noble anthropological goal of seeking to understand others in their own terms cannot be employed as an excuse to avoid making moral and ethical judgements. Individuals have the right to resist and opt out of the

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norms and expectations of particular social and cultural groupings and chart their own course.

For instance, an individual’s rights freely to choose a marriage partner take precedence over a group‘s rights to maintain cultural patterns of marital preferences—even if it is argued that these norms are basic to a definition of the groups identity. As the testaments of refugees and asylum-seekers attest, many women have recourse only to suicide in order to avoid being forced into an unwanted marriage, and it is the responsibility of the anthropologist to support those disenfranchised individuals who find themselves under the power of others (cf. Gilad 1996). However that power is locally framed and legitimated (as that of elder kinsmen, religious experts, or whatever), here are relations of domination which anthropology should oppose. Moreover, even though such conceptions of individuals taking precedence over groups, of individual freedom contra cultural hegemony, derive from Western liberalism, the United Nations International Bill of Rights which these conceptions have given onto (comprising the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966), and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (1966)) is the only framework we have by which to make decisions on globally appropriate action.

Finally, if the discourse and law of human rights are manifestations of liberalism as a modern political philosophy, then its opposition is no less political or ideological. To decry the seeming atomism of individually conceived human rights—as opposed, say, to notions of collective attachment, common good, public interest, patriotism, group loyalty, respect for tradition, and so on—is to extol the virtues of communitarianism: to wish to replace a politics of individual rights with a politics of common good, and an emphasis on collective life and the supreme value of the community.This has long had its (equally Western) social-philosophical exponents, from Toennies and Durkheim (‘[T]o experience the pleasure of saying “we”, it is important not to enjoy saying “I” too much’ (1973:240)), to MacIntyre,Taylor and Sandel today. However, as an ideology it can also be critiqued (cf. Phillips 1993). As with the aforementioned illusory notions of society and culture as sui generis, communitarianism can be said to represent a backward-looking myth of a situation of cognitive and behavioural commonality that never existed. In practice, communitarianism is often hierarchical, and always exclusionary with regard to those who do not belong—women and slaves, savages, pagans, Jews, Communists, homosexuals. In sociological usage, moreover, the ideology represents an attempt to ‘colonize’ the consciousness of individual members so that the latter are pressed into

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