In Defense of Universal Human Rights by Rhoda E. Howard-Hassmann

Author:Rhoda E. Howard-Hassmann [Howard-Hassmann, E., Rhoda]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2018-10-30T00:00:00+00:00

Community and Culture

One reason for the contemporary stress on community has been the opening up of the study of human rights beyond the traditional disciplines of law, political science, and philosophy. New critical scholars from other disciplines brought fresh perspectives.

Some anthropologists base their objections to supposedly individualistic human rights on analyses of local perceptions of justice. They rightly argue that when human rights are grounded in local beliefs or customs they are more likely to be realized. Grounding human rights in local customs sometimes requires “vernacularization” by cultural translators who understand both the international human rights regime and local customs, and who reinterpret perceived local injustices through a human rights frame.4 Local perceptions of human rights may challenge their international meaning, as local actors focus on what is important to them and on modes of justice that might not be recognized by the international human rights regime.5 However, such local grounding can result in social conflicts if basic human rights principles are lost and different groups interpret human rights in different ways.

Some critics contrast the global human rights regime to such local perceptions of justice. However, there are few places that are purely local, untouched by urbanization, globalization, and the state. Human beings do not live only within their own cultural worlds: they live within national and international political and economic worlds as well. All local cultures are embedded in the larger state system. For example, many collective rights claims by indigenous societies, often assumed to have the most local views of justice, are actually claims against global capitalist forces, such as the right to free and informed consent before any mining investments are made on their territories.

In any case, cultures are not static. Cultures change and adapt, often via contact with previously unknown ideas such as human rights. Within cultures, moreover, there are some who violate others' rights. Those who claim to speak for a culture are often those who benefit the most from its supposedly inviolable – but frequently reinterpreted – customs. These customs frequently violate what the international regime considers to be the rights of some subordinate groups. Frequently, “traditional” leaders interpret human dignity to mean that subordinated groups such as women or people whose ancestors were enslaved should know their place, and not demand individual rights to equality or participation in collective decision-making. Many local cultures also discriminate against perceived outsiders, even when such “strangers” have been living among them for centuries.

Anthropologists have played an important role in attempts to protect local cultures from human rights imperialism; that is, from the imposition of unknown customs and norms on local societies. In 1947 the American anthropologist Melville Herskovits argued that the proposed UDHR was likely to undermine many cultures. Culture, he argued, was the vehicle through which individuals realized themselves; moreover, individuals were members of groups, which required protection. Nevertheless, Herskovits also recognized that local cultures or societies were always endangered by states. Thus, he distinguished between the actions of governments and those of the underlying culture whose values, he argued, could be used to check abuses perpetrated by states.

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