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

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the matrices of perception of socio-cultural groupings and identify with them completely (cf. Cohen 1994). Hence, individuals come to be analytically treated as incidental to their social relationships and cultural institutions. This, as Cohen sums up, amounts to both flawed social science and complicity in processes of ideological hegemony:

We must make deliberate efforts to acknowledge the subtleties, inflections and varieties of individual consciousness which are concealed by the categorical masks which we have invented so adeptly. Otherwise, we will continue to deny people the right to be themselves, deny their rights to their own identities.

(1994:180)

We must, as analysts, preserve individuals’ rights to their own awareness and thus contribute to the decolonization of the human subject.

To say that it is impossible to consider individuals as bearers of rights independently of group memberships and identities, then, is to risk blinding oneself to those iniquitous failures of social arrangement from which liberalism has served as an escape, and to rob human beings of their best protections against abuses of power. On the other hand, to insist, as liberalism does, that the individual is the benchmark of justice, to believe the morally independent individual to be the ultimate source of value, is to direct the focus of attention to interpersonal ties not bounded groups: to ‘personal communities’, chosen by individuals, not ascribed ones. If community is important in people’s lives, this must be seen to be a voluntary community—of friends, neighbours, family, coworkers, co-ethnics, co-religionists—from which individuals are free to come and go. ‘[I]t is attachment rather than membership that is a general human value’ (Phillips 1993:194); hence what is preferable is an anthropological philosophy which protects the rights of attachment and detachment per se rather than particular (types of) attachments.

This is ‘post-cultural’ inasmuch as it posits individuals as ontologically prior to the cultural milieux which they create and in which they dwell. A post-cultural wisdom recognizes the universal fact of individuality whatever the hegemonic community ideology concerning ‘personhood’. Individual actors are ‘the anthropological concrete’ (Auge 1995:111) and they must remain free voluntarily to adopt or reject any number of cultural personae.

In short, it is important today for anthropologists to appreciate the right of the individual citizen to his or her own civil freedoms against cultural prejudices, against social statuses, and against the language

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embodied in their self-expressions. Hence, human rights have a universal relevance and resonance, and their advocation is a universal responsibility. In an interdependent, ‘post-cultural’ world, human rights represents a discourse offering shared standards of human dignity, with possible procedural implications for forms of global governance.

A comparative anthropology of human rights

If globalization finally bankrupts relativistic arguments, then this is not to say that the global situation becomes one of either standardization or Westernization. Rather, the situation is of global forms being animated, brought to social life and made culturally meaningful, by an endemic process of local and individual interpretation. Thus, out of global relatedness, new diversities are always being constructed.

Indeed, this is perhaps nowhere more visible than in the case of ‘human rights’. In human rights discourse and law, a global form can clearly be seen to be given a diversity of local formulations.Two major transformatory processes are found to be at play: the vernacularization of a set of international legal institutions, and the globalization of local cases of dispute. In ‘a confusion of legal tongues’ (Geertz 1983:220), local, national and transnational codes now overlap and intermix, such that there is no ‘traditional culture’ which is not an ongoing construction by people who find themselves in a pluralistic sociocultural context.

It is precisely this tension between the local and the supra-local which a ‘comparative anthropology of human rights’ study sets out to study: ‘how a transnational discourse and set of legal institutions are materialised, appropriated, resisted and transformed in a variety of contexts’ (Wilson 1997:23). Notions of human rights come to be seen as the results of concrete social struggles, embedded in local normative orders, while yet caught in translocal webs of power. Anthropologically to represent human rights violations, then, is not necessarily to ape the universalistic objectivity of legalistic declarations, nor yet to give in to absolute perspectivism where any representation is as good as any other. Rather, anthropology can judge the appropriateness of particular renditions of concrete examples of violation according to the context of their expression and intended reception. Thus a comparative anthropology of rights can contextualize without relativizing (cf. Clay 1988).

More specifically, according to Wilson (1997), an anthropology of human rights should provide thick descriptions of existential situations: should evidence how experiences of brute existence in particular

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contexts come to be translated into human rights narratives. Thus, anthropology can restore the richness of subjectivities immersed in complex fields of social relations which legalistic accounts of human rights often omit. Situating human rights within socio-cultural milieux, anthropologists can show rights to be grounded, value-laden features of social life and bound to purposive agents. Here are human rights not merely as instrumental mechanisms but as expressive too: constructing local identities, classifying and legitimating claims to self-determination and sovereignty, embodying relations of force and struggles for power between competing interest groups.

In short, anthropologists can chart how human rights are founded, possessed and transformed as complex strategic situations unfold. Hence, while the spread of human rights discourse might seem tantamount to the imperialistic interjection of a Western legal regime, a vibrant diversity and creativity undergirds this seeming globalization such that indigenous rights movements can be found appropriating the discourse as a suitable form for the expression of a vibrant local identity. In this way, the spread of ‘human rights’, albeit originally a liberal discourse, need not produce a historical process (or progress) which Western liberal theorists would immediately recognize. Nevertheless, human rights can be seen to afford a symbolic form of common denomination whereby many different individuals and groups can dialoguize.

Maybe the contextual multiplicity and openness concerning the operationalizing of human rights discourse holds lessons too for the reporting of human rights violations. At present, the genre of such reporting fails to capture the multiplicity of local narratives and subjective constructions of events. In order to produce globally consumable bits (and bytes) of information with an aura of neutrality, authority and legitimacy, decontextualized accounts impose meaning and coherence on what is chaotic and indeterminate; meanwhile, formulaic applications of international rights law can do as much harm as good to local conditions of sustainable fair government. Admittedly, a legalistic language and universal templates are an advantage for the persuading and pressurizing of nation-states. Nonetheless, if the power of human rights agencies is a discursive one, turning on the symbolic capital of certain types of information and denunciation, and if the wider audience for human rights reporting is a variegated one, then the genres of reportage should be carefully selected and likewise various. In this diversity of genres, in fine, existential anthropological accounts may have a large part to play.

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Human rights in a post-cultural world

At the outset of Anthropology as Cultural Critique (1986:vii), Marcus and Fischer posed the provocative question: ‘how is an emergent post-modern world to be represented as an object for social thought?’. Liberal— humanist notions of general humanity now take political precedence over a highlighting of autochthonous difference, while ‘Orientalist’ critique now challenges the perpetration of any form of ‘othering’. Global penetrations of systems of communication and technology mean that the once distant ‘exotic’ informant and lay reader of anthropological texts become coevals, while the extensive movements of populations (labour migrants, refugees and tourists) make the cognitive landscapes of an increasing number of people a global one.To talk of ‘culture’ and ‘intrinsic cultural difference’ in this setting rather than of some form of ‘global ecumene’ could be seen, Marcus and Fischer concluded, as a romantic revelling in inessential minutiae or as an obfuscatory denial of the nature of contemporary social reality (1986:39). It is not that the global ecumene is a homogeneous social space, rather that difference is more than ever an internal relation: of wealth, localism, ethnicity, religiosity, sex and gender within the single social arena or polity.The question for anthropology in this post-cultural environment is both how to write the meeting of internal differences and how to right it.

Perhaps an anthropology of human rights offers a way forward. For, in highlighting the discourse and the laws surrounding human rights as ‘transnational juridical processes’ (Wilson 1997:9), anthropology can point the way towards an appreciation of such rights as perhaps ‘the worlds first universal ideology’ (Weissbrodt 1988:1). That is, human rights, as discourse and law, can be seen as a concrete form of political procedure on which a global liberal polity and justice is to be founded (cf. Rorty 1986). Here is a symbolic form in which the tensions between the global and local may be played out, in which differences between identities are not elided, without thereby losing sight of the ideal of reaching consensus concerning the freedom of individual practice and belief. Anthropology can show how ‘human rights’ is being adopted as a resource in manifold local situations: a means by which identities both come together and remain distinct.

While there is a flexibility in its interpretation, limits are still imposed beyond which ‘violations of human rights’ are identifiable. As a political procedure, ‘human rights’ might say little substantively about the fundamentals of belief which the discourse expresses, but it does not say nothing. As Wilson spells it out (1997:8–9), it does not countenance the maintenance of ‘inegalitarian and repressive political systems’, it does not

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entertain ‘international acquiescence in state repression’, and it does not place culture on the level of supreme ethical value.To the contrary, in a ‘post-cultural world’, as we have seen, the focus is firmly upon culture as optional resource, as a trope of belonging, employed by individual actors on a global stage. In this situation, anthropological accounts, rich in subjectivities and social relations, can show how people the world over engage with human rights discourses and law for the effecting and expression of a diversity of identities. By writing existentialist narratives concerning human rights violations, anthropologists can complement other genres of reporting, thus ‘restor[ing] local subjectivities, values and memories as well as analysing the wider global social processes in which violence is embedded’ (Wilson 1997:157). In an anthropological dissemination of narratives of human rights, we can play our part in effecting a global society of individuals free to believe in and practise a diversity of identities which they ongoingly create.

See also: Individualism, Individuality, Literariness, Movement

HUMANISM

‘Humanism’ is a nineteenth-century term for the values, practices and ideals which are associated with the European Renaissance of the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries, and its rediscovery of the texts of Classical Greece and Rome. The Renaissance appreciation of the latter, the so-called ‘studia humanitatis’, as represented by the work of such diverse figures as Dante, Petrarch, da Vinci and Galileo, Erasmus, Montaigne, Bacon, Shakespeare and Milton, Cervantes and Copernicus, brought about a break with predominant medieval (Christian) perspectives on the nature of life. New emphases arose, a new image of humankind and its capacities. In particular, there was new faith in the power of learning and a desire freely to enlarge its bounds; a scepticism concerning the absoluteness of existing knowledge; a belief in the potentialities for creativity, growth, pleasure and action of the individual human being; and an interest in ascertaining the place of humankind in nature, of discovering the laws of nature, so that life on earth might be placed more within human control.

In succeeding centuries, the humanism of the Renaissance gave on to the Enlightenment and the rise of science, with its belief in rationality, as opposed to (religious) revelation, as an adequate source of human knowledge; also on to liberalism, and a belief in the inherent dignity of

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