Human rights are said to be basic rights that are universally held by virtual of our shared humanity. The idea of human rights is widely seen as having its origins in Enlightenment philosophy and natural rights theory in particular. However, the precise content of human rights has historically expanded, usually as a result of direct political struggles, rather than ethical theory. As such, the American Revolution of 1776 and the French Revolution of 1789 are widely seen as key events on the practical establishment of human rights. In 1948, in response to the horrors of the Second World War, the UN adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which stated that ‘All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights’ (Article 1). The areas covered by human rights claims have grown from civil and political rights, to include social and economic rights, the rights of women, the rights of migrants, indigenous rights, and sexual rights, amongst others. As the grand utopian narratives of the Cold War have declined, human rights have largely filled the gap, becoming the language within which international relations and global justice are often talked about. Important arguments remain amongst human rights practitioners however, such as the relationships between collective and individual rights, and the balance between human rights and national security, to name just two (Alston et al 2007). There are therefore two important senses of human rights that often exist in dynamic tension. The first refers to legal definitions and statutes. These are human rights as found in UN conventions and national constitutions. The second refers to the ethical and political demands made in the name of human rights, and is not limited by the narrower legal sense of human rights. However, as a result of political struggles for inclusion and greater protection, the ethical demands for human rights today can be turned into the legalized human rights tomorrow.
The relativist critique of universal human rights
Anthropologists initially had a sceptical relationship to the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In 1947 the Executive board of the American Anthropological Association issued a statement warning the UN against not attending to cultural particularities. The statement was rooted in the dominant anthropological cultural relativism of the time, but was not an absolute criticism of the idea of human rights. Rather, it expressed an anxiety that the human rights codified by the UN were not as universal as they claimed, but merely expressed a particularly Euro-American vision of what it meant to be human, based on liberal individualism. Although the statement by the AAA was based on a commitment to anti-racism and anti-colonialism, it has since been highly criticized by many anthropologists (Engle 2001). In particular it has been claimed that such scepticism about human rights results in a nihilistic relativism, where even the most abhorrent practices can be defended in the name of culture. Critics have asked whether anthropologists are really ready to defend infanticide, or female genital mutilation in the name of cultural difference. Such relativism, it has been claimed, would also lead anthropologists unable to criticize mass killings and even genocide. At a philosophical level it has been argued that culture and morality are not the same. Cultural relativism does not lead to moral relativism. Whilst it is necessary to understand every culture on its own terms, this does not rule out holding universal moral values which stand for all people, and can therefore form the basis of universal human rights claims. Finally, it has been claimed that the vision of culture that is implicitly contained in the relativist critique of human rights, implies a series of discrete and self-contained units. Such definition of culture has been criticized more widely for ignoring the ways in which ideas, people and objects flow around the world, and for seeing culture as static and given once and for all, rather than dynamic and contested. Although human rights may have their origins in the European Enlightenment, human rights NGOs, documents and claims are now to be found in every part of the world and make up an essential part of may people’s moral and political vocabularies. Human rights are therefore no more Euro-American than Coca-Cola, democracy and cricket.
The anthropological re-engagement with human rights
From the late 1970s, but increasingly so from the 1990s, anthropologists began to take up human rights as an object of anthropological enquiry. In part this has seen the search for supposed universal values upon which human rights can be based. It has been argued for example, that the objection to pain represents one such value. Critics however have pointed out that pain is not always negatively assessed, particularly in many of the world’s religious traditions (Asad 2003). Self-flagellation remains a central part of devotional practice in some forms of Christianity and Shia Islam. However, in large measure, anthropologists have put aside the relativist versus universal debate about human rights as a theoretical and moral deadend, in favour of a more practical engagement. This has, in part, been based on the fact that many anthropologists have worked with politically and economically marginalized people, and they have therefore sought to find ways to act on their behalf. These developments have to be understood in the context of wider politiciza-tion of much anthropology that took place from the 1970s. Such positions have been criticized in some quarters as distortion of anthropological research. However, as anthropologists have worked amongst indigenous peoples in Amazonia, slum dwellers in India, people living with HIV/AIDS in the Caribbean, or refugees in the Middle East, they have sought forms of political engagement that go beyond the writing of academic papers. Indeed some anthropologists have argued that ethnographic research, with its long-term engagement and deep-seated forms of empathy, creates an ethical requirement for such activism (Turner 1997). This does not mean that such anthropologists/human rights activists necessarily have a deep philosophical and political commitment to human rights, but rather that they see human rights as a tool that can be used in political struggles.
The right to culture
In 1999 the AAA adopted a new statement on human rights that declared:Anthropology as a profession is committed to the promotion and protection of the right of people and peoples everywhere to the full realization of their humanity, which is to say their capacity for culture … This implies starting from the base line of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and associated implementing international legislation, but also expanding the definition of human rights.
Above all, the right to culture was singled out as in need of protection, and the AAA pledged to be ‘concerned whenever human difference is made the basis for a denial of basic human rights’. Such a claim to a right to culture is not novel, and can be seen in the Romantic nationalists of the nineteenth century. The 1999 statement of the AAA added the more recent conceptualization of culture as dynamic and shot through with issues of inequality, in order to call for the protection of the way of life of marginalized groups around the world. However, whilst some have seen the call for a right to culture as entirely positive, others have been more sceptical (Cowan 2006). The political implications of the right to culture cannot be generalized. They can be reactionary as well as emancipatory. The demand for cultural rights has used to protect ingenious people, but also to justify misogynist and even racist practices in many places.
Human rights in practice
Perhaps the largest growth area in the anthropology of human rights has been what might be called the ‘anthropology of human rights in practice’ (Wilson 1997). Such an approach starts with the assumption that human rights claims and institutions are spread across the world. The question as to whether human rights exist in a philosophical sense is suspended to in order to explore how human rights are produced, translated and materialized. Although human rights may involve universal claims they always take place in particular local contexts. This is above all, then, an empirical project. In this approach human rights are not seen as a moral absolute or a legal norm, but a dynamic social and political practice that can be manipulated to further particular political projects. In one of the earliest and most influential examples of this approach, Sally Merry studied how indigenous rights activists in Hawaii used a mixture of pre-colonial customary law, international treaties, the US constitution and UN human rights declarations in order to indict the US government for the crimes of colonialism and the destruction of native Hawaii (Merry 1997). Although such claims had no practical force — the US government was never formally charged — Merry argues that human rights claims opened up spaces for Hawaiians to make demands outside the formal structures of the state and therefore had immense symbolic impact. Such an empirical approach to human rights has however, been open to criticism. For one, there is a danger of treating human rights in a rather idealist manner: little attention paid to the actual enforcement of human rights, in favour of a general focus on the circulation of ideas. Second, there is a danger of assuming that human rights are infinitely malleable. In this process, an image is reproduced of the liberal individual who picks and chooses their human rights claims, ignoring the ways in which the decision to make a political demand in terms of human rights limits the options available to the claimant. Human rights still depend, for example, on the state for their enforcement. Several anthropologists have sought to explore the specific nature of human rights as a form of political engagement. Anne-lise Riles, for example, has argued that the very claim that human rights are globalized is constitutive of their force as a social phenomenon (Riles 2001). Focusing on the activities of woman’s rights NGOs in the Pacific, she argues that networking itself becomes their central activity. In the flow of emails, reports and documents, little information is actually shared, with very few outputs, as human rights networks become self-producing and self-justifying. Whilst intense disagreement still remains as to the moral, cultural and political nature of human rights, anthropological engagement with human rights has proven a fertile ground for further study, enriching the discipline empirically, theoretically and ethically.
