Human Rights in Context: Culture, Power and ...

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Introduction

Introduction Human Rights in Context: Culture, Power and Personhood Neil Maclean and Gaynor Macdonald*

This collection of articles emerged from a symposium titled Culture and Rights: Scepticism, Hostility and Mutuality, coordinated by the Department of Anthropology at the University of Sydney. The title reflected our sense that the relationship between culture and rights was no longer incidental, but rather formed a recurrent thread in the contemporary points of reference of both anthropological and human rights practice. In particular, the work of Englund (2006), Goodale (2006), Humphrey and Valverde (2007), Martínez (2011), Merry (2003; 2006) and Riles (2006a) helped give form to this sense and to the way the symposium developed. A recurrent theme of the articles was the specific conditions under which anthropologists encounter rights discourse, activists, claimants and practitioners as an integral aspect of their context of research. Martínez in his keynote address (this collection) explored both the dynamics of a specific example of such a relationship and its methodological implications. The relativism of anthropology and the universalism of human rights have been explicitly at odds since the process culminating in the 1948 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The American Anthropological Association (AAA) response to that process rejected both its empirical and its ethical claims to universality (AAA 1947; Steward 1948; Gledhill 1997; Goodale 2006). The AAA formally changed its stance in 1999 (1999; Engle 2001), and the intervening years have seen a critique of the culture concept within anthropology (Trouillot 2000) and, by implication, the ‘rose-tinted’ (Wilson 1997) optimism about the inherent ethical constraints of culture that stemmed from assumptions of its bounded integrity. Decolonisation and the repositioning of power and economic relations between First and Third Worlds (and, more recently, Fourth Worlds) have prompted much of this debate, while Pardy (this collection) reminds us of the central significance to this critique of feminist scholarship and activism. Feminist concerns in particular brought out the inherent interconnection of ‘variability both within and between cultures’ to issues of ‘agency’ and ‘power’ (Lamphere 2007, xiii–xiv).

* Neil

Maclean,

Senior

Lecturer,

Department

of

Anthropology,

University

of

Sydney.

Email: [email protected]. Gaynor Macdonald, Department of Anthropology, University of Sydney. Email: [email protected].

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Notwithstanding these shifts in the conceptualisation of culture, anthropologists have continued to endorse the statement’s critique of the liberal assumption of individualism and the inherent neo-imperialism of the marginalisation of cultural difference (Macdonald, this collection). Riles reminds us that its ‘willingness to name the hegemonic ambitions of legal and technocratic knowledge is refreshing, even moving, and for this reason it has had considerably more currency in human rights circles than anthropologists realize’ (2006b, 504). Anthropology’s disciplinary engagement with human rights did not begin until the late 1980s, after which it intensified rapidly (Goodale 2006). Messer’s (1993) overview is generally taken as the programmatic text. This was coterminous with anthropology’s response to the rise of globalisation as a field of debate in the 1980s, and the broader recognition by the end of the 1980s of the social destructiveness of an unvarnished neo-liberal agenda. Indicative of this recognition was the institution in 1990 of the Human Development Index, signalling the shift from income and market efficiency (Washington consensus) to wellbeing in debates about development. As part of this broader transformation, participation by anthropologists in a range of social science debates around issues of globalisation (global/local), social justice and social suffering, development, civil society, sustainability and indigeneity has become a core aspect of the discipline. Moyn’s recent rereading of the history of human rights suggests a similar inflection by processes of globalisation. He dates that shift from the 1970s and proposes that ‘the central event in human rights history is the recasting of rights as entitlements that might contradict the sovereign nation-state from above and outside rather than serve as its foundation’ (Moyn 2010, 13). Most tellingly, he contrasts the implication of an early modern history of rights focused on a ‘politics of citizenship at home’ with a contemporary focus on a ‘politics of suffering abroad’ (Moyn 2010, 12). Pardy, Lamchek and Martínez (this collection), in particular, remind us that this globalisation of both anthropology and human rights has been accompanied by the increasing participation of a wide range of Third World, southern, minority and indigenous intellectuals, policy makers and activists who have contested the epistemological and technocratic status and utopian claims of (among others) anthropology (Martínez, this collection; Ribeiro and Escobar 2006), development (Escobar 2012; Hettne 1995), law (Lamchek, this collection) and feminism (Pardy, this collection). This collection provides an insight into the range of contexts implied in the term ‘abroad’. Lamchek, Martínez and Pardy ground their broader critical engagements with human rights on case studies of people who are in varying ways discursively constituted as out of place, reflecting migrant, refugee and labour migration histories. The three studies provide a perspective on the strategies mobilised to either gain, or

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sustain, rights of citizenship and the pragmatics of the (ambivalent) decision to do so on the basis of rights claims (Martínez), the decision to avoid rights claims (Lamchek), and in fact the need to resist rights claims in order to sustain those rights (Pardy). Macdonald and Vincent take us through the vicissitudes of people who are construed as out of place on their own country. Their work connects with Lamchek’s second case study of the anthropology of indigenous autonomy in Chiapas, Mexico (drawing on the work of Speed). In all three cases, we find varying forms of rejection and/or ambivalence with regard to accepting the language of rights as mediating their relationship to country/land and to each other. We also see the potential for people to become victims of the contradictions between different kinds of rights. The elaboration of human rights mechanisms intersects with a parallel challenge to histories of dispossession and thus to the inextricably lived intersection between human and property rights. Maclean identifies another transformation of this thread in the way people with a disability are confined within places, and relationships of ‘care’, and the contradictions between the relational qualities of care and the capacity for genuine civic recognition. A very different politics of civic recognition is evident as Wiss takes us through the global dynamics of the complex intersection of political and moral control over the mobility of people in the discursive and legal elaboration of the problem of ‘trafficking’. Her case study explores the contextually specific workings out of legal (international rights regimes and state law) and moral (discourse of trafficking, rescue and prostitution) pluralism. In this context, rights discourse is the denial of agency in the construction of victimhood (see also Martínez 2011). Wiss shares with Humphrey, Macdonald and Lamchek a concern with the links between rights regimes, moral discourses and governmentality. Lamchek and Humphrey shift our attention from the discursive constitution of victimhood to the critique of narratives of human rights resistance and empowerment. Lamchek’s analytic point of departure is ‘Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL)’ as a perspective on the ‘struggles of subordinated collectivities in which making use of international human rights law for emancipation often results in the reinscription of their subordination’. Humphrey, in a provocative re-evaluation of the celebrated Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina, shifts our attention from ‘grassroots struggle’ to an understanding of ‘political subjectivities’ in which the individuating effects of terror are reappropriated through the ‘contemporary neoliberal political project’ in the guise of human rights. Humphrey, Lamchek, Martínez and Wiss all provide evidence of the way human rights-based approaches have become integral to the contemporary expansion of civil society-based organisations as the ideologically privileged solution to producing a

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more fine-grained participation in the market, projects of development and public health, and the formal political process (Fisher 1997; Howell and Pearce 2002). Howell and Pearce contrast two major traditions in the valuation of civil society: as part of a virtuous circle encompassing also the state and the market as the great division of labour of modern society; and as a ground on which the always potential excess of both state power and market logic might be resisted. Established arguments for human rights encompass both of these visions. However, the contemporary expansion of civil society organisations has also been critiqued as a mechanism enabling the extension of neoliberal forms of governmentality. The iconic development paradigm of microcredit, for instance, has been a particular target of such analysis (Kabeer 2001; Karim 2008). It is not surprising, then, that human rights will be drawn into this broader suspicion of the appearance of empowerment as being the stalking horse for distinctively neoliberal forms of individuation. Such arguments take us to a key point of Cowan’s more general review: that ‘rights are productive (of subjectivities, of social relations, and even of the very identities and cultures they claim merely to recognize)’ (2006, 10). They cannot be understood simply as a neutral means to achieve diverse life goals. Whether understood in the positive sense of empowerment or capability, or in the negative sense of loss, the claiming, exercise and realisation of rights changes people and relationships. Put in another way, rights imply issues of personhood. This is the explicit point of both Macdonald’s and Maclean’s articles, and the implied point of Vincent’s: for Aunty Joan persons are not holders of rights in country, but rather those who ‘stick up for country’. For Macdonald, the relational quality of indigenous personhood is twofold. It is first a set of relationships that liberal Australia cannot swallow, enmeshed in kinship as the social world and, embedded in place, entailing rights that are specific to that world. Second, indigeneity is an unsettled relationship between indigenous peoples and the state, in which both expressions of personhood and rights that attach to these are contested. The bias in a rights perspective is to privilege that distinctively modern conception of the human as potential, and the peculiarly exhilarating and alienating condition of freedom required to realise it. From such a perspective, indigenous people are required to choose their tradition. However, in doing so, they are now choosing a mode of life that has been indelibly marked as ‘unfreedom’. Sen’s (1999) influential manifesto for a development grounded on substantive freedoms spells out precisely such an ambivalent relationship to tradition (1999, ch 1). Maclean points out that personhood does not go uncontested within modernist contexts, and that the dialectics of autonomy and dependence form one of the fault lines of an occidental history of ethical and moral discourse. While of distinctive concern to feminist perspectives and discussions of the ethics of care, Maclean

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explores the dialectical interplay between the relational ground of personhood and rights claims within the context of the politics of disability. But if we are to recognise the power of human rights discourse and regimes to produce particular kinds of subjects and relationships, then by definition their impact goes beyond the instrumentality of specific claims and rhetorical invocations. They are utopian (Goodale 2009; Moyn 2010). The irony of the cases of illegal migrant workers discussed by Lamchek is that they explicitly reject the tactic of human rightsbased claims in order to gain what they regard as human rights (and see Englund 2006). While such campaigns are focused on pragmatic concerns with access to services and driving licences, it seems clear that the longer-term issue is of access to a specific space of freedom from which they have otherwise been excluded. There is no doubt that human rights form one way in which people imagine both that freedom and their exclusion. The contribution of anthropology to debates about human rights also turns on issues of method. Anthropology is one of a range of social science disciplines that privilege the social context of a phenomenon (event, utterance, symbol, representation and so on) as the ground of its interpretation. It is on this basis that there has long been a convergence between legal anthropology and the pragmatic tradition in jurisprudence (Moore 2001; Riles 2003). Lamchek’s concern as a critical legal scholar with the pragmatic contexts of the realisation of rights reflects this sensibility, and it is for this reason that his contribution bookends this collection with Martínez’s methodologically focused keynote article. Anthropology, however, is distinctive in its emphasis on the participant engagement of the researcher in that context as the key to its method. It must be emphasised that this is not a matter of the experience of single events, but rather the embeddedness of the phenomena under study in life as it unfolds over sustained periods of time. ‘Fieldwork’ is initially usually a minimum of a year, and for many anthropologists their relation to a particular context of study is recurrent and extends over a lifetime. Malinowski long ago stated the basic principle of this method: ‘discussion of facts connected with the direct observation of a custom, or with a concrete occurrence, in which both parties are materially concerned’ (Malinowski, cited in Stocking 1983, 97–98). We should extend this from customs and occurrences to the implication of the anthropologist in the projects of the people with whom she or he works — particularly apparent in Martínez’s and Vincent’s articles. In Martínez’s case, he extends that concern to a reconsideration of the method. Whereas in Malinowski’s case the joint relationship to custom was predicated on difference, Martínez emphasises both the similarities and the differences that he and his collaborators share in their relation to the social context of study — hence the term ‘para-ethnography’.

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With this understanding of method in mind, it is important to understand that most of the writers in this collection have not come to their field with rights in mind. Rather, they have come to rights from a range of specific standpoints: labour migration and slum livelihood strategies in Haiti and the Dominican Republic (Martínez); a specific focus on Vietnamese women in Melbourne (Pardy); sex tourism in the Philippines (Wiss); long-term ethnography of indigenous community and life-history in New South Wales and its encompassment in a history of racism (Macdonald); and an autoethnographic concern with care and autism (Maclean). In Vincent’s case, her context of research was framed from the beginning by the native title regime, but her focus was precisely on local strategies that explicitly looked elsewhere. Humphrey’s and Lamchek’s works come closest to an inherent focus on rights, and even in those cases rights are approached from the standpoint of the broader constitutive contexts of terror and reconciliation (Humphrey) and citizenship (Lamchek). In many of these contexts, it is hardly surprising that researchers have been compelled to engage with rights-based forms of discourse, activism and governance. Two issues, then, need to be kept in mind in appreciating the contributions that these articles make to the broader field of rights research and debate. First, the writers are thrown into rights with the social context of that engagement already in mind — they do not have to contextualise rights, but come to them from that context. Second, the rights that anthropologists are thrown into have already been ‘vernacularised’ within the social context of the encounter (Merry 2006; Pardy). l

References American Anthropological Association (AAA) (1947) ‘Statement of human rights’ 49(4) American Anthropologist 539–43 American Anthropological Association (AAA) (1999) ‘Declaration on Anthropology and Human Rights’ [Online] Available: www.aaanet.org/about/Policies/statements/ Declaration-on-Anthropology-and-Human-Rights.cfm [2013, June 19] Cowan J (2006) ‘Culture and rights after Culture and Rights’ 108(1) American Anthropologist 9–24 Engle K (2001) ‘From skepticism to embrace: human rights and the American Anthropological Association from 1947–1999’ 23(3) Human Rights Quarterly 536–59 Englund H (2006) Prisoners of Freedom: Human Rights and the African Poor California Series in Public Anthropology, University of California Press, Berkeley

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Eriksen T (2001) ‘Between universalism and relativism: a critique of the UNESCO concept of culture’ in Culture and Rights: Anthropological Perspectives, ed J Cowan, M Dembour and R Wilson, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp 127–48 Escobar A (2012) Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World: With a New Preface by the Author Princeton University Press, Princeton Fisher W F (1997) ‘Doing good? The politics and antipolitics of NGO practices’ 26 Annual Review of Anthropology 439–64 Gledhill J (1997) ‘Liberalism, socio-economic rights and the politics of identity: from moral economy to indigenous rights’ in Human Rights, Culture & Context: Anthropological Perspectives, ed R Wilson, Pluto Press, London and Chicago, pp 70–110 Goodale M (2006) ‘Toward a critical anthropology of human rights’ 47(3) Current Anthropology 485–98 Goodale M (2009) Surrendering to Utopia: An Anthropology of Human Rights Stanford University Press Hettne B (1995) Development Theory and the Three Worlds: Towards an International Political Economy of Development (2nd ed) Longman Scientific & Technical, Harlow Howell J and Pearce J (2002) Civil Society and Development: A Critical Exploration Lynne Rienner Publishers Humphrey M and Valverde E (2007) ‘Human rights, victimhood and impunity: an anthropology of democracy in Argentina’ 51(1) Social Analysis 179–97 Kabeer N (2001) ‘Conflicts over credit: re-evaluating the empowerment potential of loans to women in rural Bangladesh’ 29(1) World Development 63–84 Karim L (2008) ‘Demystifying micro-credit: the Grameen Bank, NGOS, and neoliberalism in Bangladesh’ 20(1) Cultural Dynamics 5–29 Lamphere L (2007) ‘Foreword: taking stock — the transformation of feminist theorizing in anthropology’ in Feminist Anthropology: Past, Present, and Future, ed P L Geller and M K Stockett, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, pp ix–xvi Martínez S (2011) ‘Taking better account: contemporary slavery, gendered narratives, and the feminization of struggle’ 2(2) Humanity 277–303

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Merry S E (2003) ‘Human rights law and the demonization of culture (and anthropology along the way)’ 26(1) PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review 55–77 Merry S E (2006) ‘Transnational human rights and local activism: mapping the middle’ 108(1) American Anthropologist 38–51 Messer E (1993) ‘Anthropology and human rights’ 22 Annual Review of Anthropology 221–49 Moore S F (2001) ‘Certainties undone: fifty turbulent years of legal anthropology 1949–1999’ 7(1) Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 95–116 Moyn S (2010) The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts Ribeiro G L and Escobar A (2006) World Anthropologies: Disciplinary Transformations in Systems of Power Berg, Oxford and New York Riles A (2003) ‘Introduction’ 26(2) PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review 1–7 Riles A (2006a) ‘Anthropology, human rights, and legal knowledge: culture in the iron cage’ 108(1) American Anthropologist 52–65 Riles A (2006b) ‘Comment on Goodale M “Toward a Critical Anthropology of Human Rights”’ 47(3) Current Anthropology 503–04 Sen A (1999) Development as Freedom Oxford University Press, New York and Oxford Steward J (1948) ‘Comments on the statement on human rights’ 50(2) American Anthropologist 351–52 Stocking G W Jr (1983) ‘The ethnographer’s magic: fieldwork in British anthropology from Tylor to Malinowski’ in Observers Observed: Essays on Ethnographic Fieldwork, Vol 1, ed G Stocking, University of Wisconsin Press, pp 70–120 Townsend J, Porter G and Mawdsley E (2004) ‘Creating spaces of resistance: development NGOs and their clients in Ghana, India and Mexico’ 36(5) Antipode 871–89

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Trouillot M-R (2000) ‘Adieu, culture: a new duty arises’ in Anthropology Beyond Culture, ed R G Fox and B J King, Berg, Oxford, pp 37–60 Wilson R (1997) ‘Human rights, culture and context: an introduction’ in Human Rights, Culture & Context: Anthropological Perspectives, ed R Wilson, Pluto Press, London and Chicago World Commission on Culture and Development (1995) Our Creative Diversity UNESCO

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