Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
5.1 CULTURE AND
HUMAN RIGHTS
Changing Approaches to Culture in
Development Discourses
Since the mid-1990s, the importance of culture has been increasingly
acknowledged in development discourses. This has resulted in what
has been termed a 'cultural turn' in development policy and practice.
'Culture' is, however, a contested concept, associated with multiple
meanings which have changed over time and which have influenced
development policy and practice. This chapter traces the changing rela-
tionship between culture and development, before exploring the rise of
rights-based approaches to development and the potential, tensions
and challenges of the rights discourse in relation to culture.
Early understandings defined 'culture' as the actions of humans on
nature, such as the cultivation of land, production of crops and animals,
or as the symbolic behaviour of humans, which established class hier-
archies and privileged elite lifestyles (Crang, 1998). During the eight-
eenth and nineteenth centuries, however, a notion of culture emerged
as a process of social development and 'civilization', based on dominant
Enlightenment values and moralities. Imperial expansion and coloniza-
tion were underpinned by racial ideologies that generalized a distinc-
tion between 'civilized' and 'uncivilized' peoples across entire nations
and world regions and resulted in non-Europeans being labelled as
'primitive' and 'inferior' (Schech and Haggis, 2000).
This understanding of culture was based on a binary opposition
between 'traditional' and 'modern' that devalued traditional cultural
values. Early approaches to development were informed by such under-
standings of culture. Modernization theory from the 1950s onwards, for
example, was based on assumptions that Third World countries would
follow a linear trajectory of development from a 'traditional' to a 'mod-
ern' society (see Chapters 1.1 and 2.1). Culture was seen as a barrier to
progress and it was assumed that traditional cultural values and
