The potential of human rights in a post-cultural world

Review urticle The potential of human rights z zyxw zyxw zyxwvut in a post-cultural world Human rights, culture and context. Anthropological perspectives. Edited by Richard A. Wilson. London and Chicago: Pluto Press. 1997. viii + 227 pp. Pb.: E13.99. ISBN 0 745 31142 3. Hb.: E40. ISBN 0 745 31143 1. Anthropology is often viewed by human-rights’ theorists and activists as ‘the last bastion of cultural absolutism’ (p. 3), Richard Wilson explains in the Introduction to this timely, important and constructive volume. In a ‘post-cultural’ world, as Wilson terms it, a world where ‘[tlhe ‘fantasy’ that humanity is divided into [discrete groups] with clear frontiers of language and culture seems finally to be giving way to notions of disorder and openness’ (p. lo), anthropologists remain committed to a romantic communitarianism and relativism. They continue to believe that, as canonised by the 1947 statement of the American Anthropological Association executive board (penned chiefly 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). (Moreover, cultures are imbued with an inherent moral rectitude - such that one might always expect ‘underlying cultural values’ ultimately to assuage immoral political systems (ibid.: 543)). In short, over a period in which, for better o r for worse (for better by far, in my estimation), ‘human rights’ as discourse and as international law has enjoyed enormous growth, such that human rights has become ‘one of the most globalised political values of our times’ (Wilson, p. I),anthropology has remained relativistically aloof, if not sceptical. This makes a sad indictment, even though we might all be able to rehearse (even with some sympathy) the thinking behind such anthropological relativism. 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 who is meant to act as the bearer of rights - only socially constructed persons. In short, notions of ‘human nature’ and of ‘rights’ which derive from the fact of being human are historically and culturally bounded, it is concluded; 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 is to be read as a charter of idealistic, postEnlightenment, European political philosophy in the wake of the Second World War and the Holocaust: a continuation of Kantian attempts to establish an Archimedean point which might provide rational foundations for universal norms of justice. In its application - in Western interference in moral issues internal to other cultures - the SocialAnt~ropology(1998),6. 3, 381-388. @ 1998 European Association of Social Anthropologists zy zyx 381 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. Equally well rehearsed are the arguments against such relativistic thinking. It has morally nihilistic, politically conservative and quietist consequences; and it is imbued with a relativistic meta-narrative concerning cultural difference which is logically inconsistent (see Gellner 1993). What Wilson draws most attention to here, perhaps, is the outmoded modelling of society and of culture which anthropological relativism (and its philosophical hangers-on: Macintyre, Dworkin et al.) continues to peddle. Society and culture are depicted as reified and as ontologically secure. They are modelled as entities not processes: hermetically bounded and discrete; internally integrated and homogeneous; 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 (see Barth 1992), but it is worthless in contemporary existential contexts of hybridity (Bhabha) and creolisation (Hannerz), of synchronicity (Tambiah) and compression (Paine). As Wilson puts it, ‘bounded conceptions of linguistic and cultural systems’ are out of place at a time when ‘culture’ may be characterised as ‘contested, fragmented, contextualised and emergent’ (p. 9). However, if globalisation finally bankrupts relativistic arguments, then this is not to say that the global situation becomes one of either standardisation or Westernisation. 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. Nowhere is this more visible, moreover, 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 vernacularisation of a set of international legal institutions, and the globalisation 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 socio-cultural context. zyxwvut zyxw zyxw zyxw A c o m p a r a t i v e anthropology of human r i g h t s It is precisely this tension between the local and the supra-local which Wilson would have a ‘comparative anthropology of human rights’ study: ‘how a transnational discourse and set of legal institutions are materialised, appropriated, resisted and transformed in a variety of contexts’ (p. 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 trans-local webs of power. Anthropologically to represent human rights violations 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. This gets anthropology beyond the universalism/ 382 zy zyxwvutsrq NlGEL RAPPORT relativism dichotomy to ‘situational analyses’ which ‘contextualise without relativising’. More specifically, Wilson would have a comparative anthropology of human rights provide thick descriptions of existential situations: to evidence how experiences of brute existence in cultural contexts come to be translated into human rights narratives. In this way, anthropology can restore the richness of subjectivities immersed in complex fields of social relations which legalistic accounts of human rights often omit. Anthropologists can present human rights not merely as instrumental mechanisms but as expressive too: expressive of political struggles and of selfidentification. Situating human rights within social matrices, anthropologists can show rights to be grounded, value-laden features of social life and bound to purposive agents; moreover, anthropologists can chart how human rights are founded, possessed and transformed as complex strategic situations unfold. The seven substantive chapters which follow Wilson’s programmatic Introduction to his volume set out to put such a comparative anthropology into practice. And with some degree of success. John Gledhill (via Mexican ethnography) and Thomas Hylland Eriksen (via Mauritius) compare the opposing conceptions of the common good in individualistic versus collectivist ideologies. Sally Engle Merry (via Hawaii), Eriksen, Gledhill, and David Stoll (via Guatemala) show how human rights law represents ‘social work’; it constructs local identities, it classifies and legitimates claims to self-determination and sovereignty, it embodies relations of force and struggles for power between competing interest groups. Stoll and Jennifer Schirmer (via Guatemala) show how formulaic applications of international rights’ law can do more harm than good to local conditions of sustainable fair government. Tala1 Asad (via questions of ‘torture’), Eriksen, Richard Wilson (via Guatemala), Gledhill and Schirmer criticise overly narrow liberal and legalistic conceptions of human rights, in particular the social decontextualisation and the disregard for subjective agency which abstract representations of universal justice perforce effect. More nearly, 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 globalisation such that indigenous rights movements (such as in Hawaii) can be found appropriating the discourse as a suitable form for the expression of a resistant local identity. In this way, the spread of ‘human rights’, albeit originally a liberal discourse, might not produce an historical process (or progress) which Western liberal theorists (such as John Rawls) might recognise; imposing ‘civilised’ standards on subject peoples (outlawing ‘cruel and unusual punishments’, for instance) might not create the new human subjects it was once intended. Nonetheless, human rights can be seen to afford a symbolic form of common denomination whereby (as in Mauritius) many different individuals and groups can dialogise. Maybe this contextual multiplicity and openness concerning the operationalising of human-rights discourse holds lessons too for the reporting of human rights violations. At present, the genre of such reporting (in Guatemala, for instance) 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, decontextualised accounts impose meaning and coherence on what is chaotic and indeterminate. Admittedly, a legalistic language and universal templates are an advantage for the persuading and pressurising of nation-states - however ironic the situation of anti- zyxwv zyx HUMAN RIGHTS I N A POST-CULTURAL WORLD 383 zy torture campaigners sharing comparable de-subjectifying techniques to the torturers themselves. 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 surely the genres of reportage should be carefully selected and likewise various. I n this diversity of efforts, moreover, existential anthropological accounts have no small part to play. Postmodern bourgeois liberalism The extent to which anthropologists can or should act in concert with human rights activists in the dissemination of information on abuse has long been a disputed matter. Wilson, however, seems sure: in its own terms, anthropology can and should. I would applaud his view, and, by and large, I think his fellow-contributors to the volume would agree too: ‘human rights’ have an universal relevance and resonance, and are therefore an universal responsibility. What is most challenging in Wilson’s framing of the topic is his insistence on the world we live in being a post-cultural one; and on human rights as representing a discourse with procedural implications for some form of global governance. I am reminded of the question with which Marcus and Fischer’s famously opened their volume, Anthropology us cultural critique (1986: vii): ‘how is an emergent postmodern world to be represented as an object for social thought?’. ‘Culture’, as the ground for anthropological analysis, no longer remains viable in a world of global interdependence; cultural differences no longer really matter. That is: 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 ‘culture’ in this setting rather than some form of ‘global ecumene’ can be seen, Marcus and Fischer concluded (anticipating Wilson), 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 an 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. For me, the philosopher Richard Rorty provides good pointers to answering this anthropologically, in connexion with outlining an ideal type of polity which he envisages: ‘postmodern bourgeois liberalism’ (1991: 198; and cf. Rapport 1997: 1SOff.). In particular, in his celebrated essay, ‘Reply to Clifford Geertz’ (1986), Rorty presents an argument whereby anthropological advocacy can be pursued while yet keeping this distinct from the ethnocentric project of the missionary. Anthropological work, Rorty begins, has been among the principle vehicles of recent moral change and progress. For, as ‘connoisseurs of diversity’ (1986: 529-30), what anthropologists d o is extend the range of moral discourse of members of a society, so that people notice and can conceive of ‘having a conversation with’ - sharing a society with, employing the beliefs zyxwvutsr zyxwvu zyxwv zy 384 NlGEL RAPPORT zyxw zyxw and traditions of, sympathising with the hurt of - more and more different sorts of people. The expanding, through anthropological ‘narrations of particularity’, of people’s moral imagination has the effect of more and more different sorts of people being possibly included, as ‘one of us’, in ‘our community’. This writing of difference Rorty ties in closely with an apposite treating of difference - with its practical ‘righting’. For when the connoisseurs of diversity have begun to persuade their audience of a global humanity, the moral torch may be passed on to those whom Rorty calls ‘guardians of universality’ (1986: 529). These are officers of a polity whose responsibility is to ensure that once the alien has been admitted into society, it is treated properly and fairly. Guardians of universality are doctors, lawyers and teachers, as well as ombudsmen and civil servants, and Rorty calls their brief ‘procedural justice’ (1986: 528). This is a curtailing of the final end of absolute liberty of each individual so as to make room for that of others, and also a curtailing of expectations concerning the everyday reach of deep understanding. N o single overarching criterion of arbitration is expected to be available, within a polity, to decide between or reconcile very different moralities; they remain unharmonisable, without final synthesis. Courtesy of the connoisseurs of diversity, one may liberally admit many individuals into one’s polity, but then one does not expect necessarily to share their sense of what is ultimately or even proximately meaningful, one does not seek to convert them to one’s own perspective, and one does not wish to have them missionise either. All one expects is a common respect for the procedural institutions of the polity which seek to balance, in an ad hoc, concrete, case-by-case fashion, the competing demands of diverse perspectives while not serving the exclusive interests of any one. The polity which employs and empowers both connoisseurs of diversity and guardians of universality is a liberal and democratic one; it is liberal democracy which prides itself on always extending the range of its sympathies, and wherein tolerance of diversity is the source of a sense of moral self-worth. The main point to be appreciated, for Rorty, is that in the liberal polity which he envisages, procedures will be instituted whereby difference does not preclude equal treatment. O n the contrary, difference from one another is the basis of citizens’ equality. The key distinction is between public and private: between public procedures and private diversities. Here is a meeting of different social identities under the aegis of universalistic procedural rules but with no insistence on a necessarily closer, more private meeting. The procedures over which a liberal polity calls for consensus, and which a liberal polity would advocate other parts of the world adopting, entail little substantive agreement. Hence, ‘postmodern bourgeois liberalism’ represents a procedural environment which makes institutional but not substantive assumptions of a meeting of difference. Rorty’s ideal polity is ‘postmodern’ in as much as its citizens possess an ironic attitude to all beliefs, including their own liberal ones. They recognise that liberal beliefs pertain to no ‘necessary rationality’ and tap into no ‘common human nature’; the beliefs are recent, local, Western cultural developments, the manifestation of one particular form of life, and they are unusual: to many other forms of life, past and present, they might even appear abhorrent. Nevertheless, the postmodern liberal still believes that practically his beliefs hold ‘the best hope for the species’ (1986: 532). Hence, he is prepared to assert their superiority and their global pertinence in a language which he knows to be a situated human creation and by reference to standards he knows to be contingent. Postmodern bourgeois liberalism, in short, intends a wide public civility, a zyxwvu zyxwvu HUMAN RIGHTS I N A POST-CULTURAL WORLD S86 zy universalistic procedural umbrella, under which a veritable bazaar of private diversity may maintain itself and flourish. Its institutions are to provide the practical benefit whereby different identities may live together without intruding on one another’s privacy or meddling with one another’s notions of the good. However, while the practicalities of liberal procedure might say little substantively about the fundamentals of belief which are held within the polity, they do not say nothing. Firstly, they say that the procedures are sacrosanct and must take precedence even over the absoluteness of freedom of belief (which might otherwise cause an overthrow of the procedures and the freedoms of others). Secondly, liberal procedures presume a belief in human equality which pertains not merely to different cultural beliefs and social practices in the abstract but to their individual carriers, creators and users. Irrespective of culture and society, and quite independent of the contingencies of particular languages, individual human beings are equal in respect to their ability to be creative and their liability to suffer; and on the basis of this equality alone, ‘there is something within human beings which deserves respect and protection’ (1992: 88). Truth may be lost as a criterion of universal value but humane behaviour remains. It is not simply, then, that a postmodern liberal polity is best because it recognises and respects the diversity of cultures (and seeks to manage their just interaction), but because it recognises and respects the individual diversity (the diversity of individuals) by which these cultures are constituted, and upon which their formal samenesses stand. To repeat Wilson’s term, the polity is ‘post-cultural’; it posits individuals as ontologically prior to the cultural milieux which they create and in which they dwell. It is individuals who can be seen as animating, maintaining and transforming cultural truths, while cultural communities should be seen to represent individuals’ voluntary choices of situational belonging. Whatever the hegemonic community ideology concerning ‘personhood’ - concerning the esteeming of individualism or its negation, and the proprieties of personal public expression - a post-cultural wisdom recognises the universal fact of individuality. Individual actors are ‘the anthropological concrete’ (Auge 1995: 11 1) and they must remain free voluntarily to adopt or reject any number of cultural personae. In short, the liberal polity which is to be globalised is one which publicly respects the right of the individual citizen to his own civil freedoms against cultural prejudices, against social statuses, and against the language embodied in their self-expressions. This is to be brought about, Rorty concludes, by globally ‘maximising the quality of education, freedom of the press, educational opportunity, opportunities to exert political influence, and the like’; this might then inculcate a ‘free and open encounter’ between individuals engaging in undistorted, ‘domination-free communication’ (1 992: 67-8). Given open communication and free discussion, Rorty is assured, people would not abide by (or expect others to abide by) concepts of the person or self, and of selfesteem, which ultimately cause harm to the individual; females would not agree to genital-mutilation nor males to suicide-bombing, and no individual would condone the absolute certainty of a religious or metaphysical fundamentalism and the cruelties which inexorably follow. Through these liberal procedures, in sum, individuals can be expected to seek to make the ‘best selves’ for themselves that they can, not allow this potential to be curtailed by cultural, social or linguistic norms (whether this curtailment is self-inflicted or imposed), and grant others the space to do likewise (Rorty 1992: 80). zy zyxwvu zyx 808 zyxwvut NlGEL RAPPORT zyxwv zyx zyxwvuts Human rights n a r r a t i v e s Leaving aside conventional anthropological responses to the above - whether relativistic in ethos, communitarian, Marxian o r whatever - for me, the only really significant weaknesses are realpolitische ones. H o w is one to ‘maximise the quality of education’ in a fundamentalist regime? H o w is one to inculcate ‘domination-free communication’ in a totalitarian milieu? I am not sure I would go as far as the positivist-realist Gellner (1993: 60ff.), and assert that, far from people coming to see its idealistic strengths, liberalism wins out, where and when it does, because Western capitalism as an industrial-military complex wins out. Nevertheless, in employing Rorty, there is a need for anthropologists to consider more than merely philosophical arguments and engage concretely with different world-views. There are certain political facts of o u r shared, global, human condition today. O n e of these, as Gellner phrases it, is that if ‘Western culture’ (including ideas of rationality, science and technology, and liberal democracy) claims to b e a meaning-system which possesses relevance for all, then through reactionary measures as diverse as religious fundamentalism and female circumcision, ethnic militancy and romantic localism, many other forms of life continue to make sporadic war against the West as best they can (Gellner 1993: 79). O n e cannot expect a peaceful accommodation to Western ideas, however ultimately democratic and beneficial, and anthropologists must equip themselves for arenas of vicious contestation. Both in terms of writing this situation and of righting it, I find Wilson’s edited volume to be an important step forward. F o r in highlighting the discourse and the laws surrounding human rights as ‘transnational juridical processes’ (Wilson, p. 9), the volume points the way towards an appreciation of human rights as perhaps ‘the world’s first universal ideology’ (Weissbrodt 1988: 1). That is, human rights, as discourse and law, can be seen as a concrete form of Rorty’s ‘sacrosanct procedures’ o n which a global liberal polity is to be founded so as to give onto ‘procedural justice’. 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. Wilson and his contributors 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. Thcre is a flexibility in its interpretation, and yet limits are 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 (pp. 8-9), it does not countenance the maintenance of ‘inegalitarian and repressive political systems’, it does not entertain ‘international acquiescence in state repression’, and it does not place culture o n the level of supreme ethical value. To the contrary, in a ‘post-cultural world’, the focus is firmly upon culture as optional resource, as a trope of belonging, employed by individual actors o n 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. They thus ‘restore local subjectivities, values and memories as well as analyzing the wider global social processes in which violence is embedded’ (Wilson p. 157). zyxwv HUMAN RIGHTS IN A POST-CULTURAL WORLD zyx 387 zyxwvu I am reminded, finally, of something Paul Ricoeur wrote concerning the need to imagine a ‘post-national state’ in Europe (1996:passim).Human identity is a recounted story, he expounded, and we are all entangled in stories, others’ and our own. In a global society, however, we must d o more than merely share these stories, we must take responsibility for them, our own and others’. For while it might be that the ‘inalienable character of life experiences’ means that we cannot directly partake of the lives of others, nevertheless, by a respectful exchange of life-narratives we can imagine our way in and we can sympathise. It is through the genuine labour of such ‘narrative hospitality’, for Ricoeur, that common symbolic forms might be instituted which do not replicate the closure and the structure of totalising communities; instead this instituting would recognise the ineluctably polyglot and mobile nature of identity, in debt to the past but always in partnership with innovation. The process of reinterpretation of identity is endemic, and we must protect the conditions of its taking place. 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 practice a diversity of identities which they ongoingly create. zyxwvutsr zyxwvu Nigel Rapport Department of Anthropology University of St Andrews St Andrews Fyfe KY16 9AL Scotland References American Anthropological Association. 1947. ‘Statement on human rights’, American Anthropologist, 49(4), 539-43. Auge, M. 1995. Non-places. Introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity. London: Verso, Barth, F. 1992 ‘Towards a greater naturalism in conceptualising societies’, in A. Kuper (ed.), Conceptualising Society. London: Routledge. Geertz, C. 1983. Local knowledge. New York: Basic. Gellner, E. 1993. Postmodernism, reason and religion. London: Routledge. Marcus, G. and Fischer, M. 1986. Anthropology as cdtural critique. An experimental moment in the human sciences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rapport, N. J. 1997. Transcendent individual: Towards a liberal and literary anthropology. London: Routledge. Ricoeur, P. 1996. ‘Reflections on a new ethos for Europe’, in R. Kearney (ed.), Paul Ricoeur. The hermeneutics of action. London: Sage. Rorty, R. 1986. ‘On ethnocentrism: A reply to Clifford Geertz’, Michigan Quarterly Review, 25 (Winter), 525-34. 1991. Objectivity, relativism, and truth. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1992. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Weissbrodt, W. 1988. ‘Human rights: An historical perspective’, in P. Davies (ed.), Human rights London: Routledge. 388 zyxw zyxwvuts zyxwvutsrq NlGEL RAPPORT