Culture and Rights: Scepticism, Hostility, Mutuality

The relationship between the concept of culture and that of human rights has long been complex and contentious.

On the one hand, culture and human rights can be seen as locked in a mutually antagonistic embrace. For many human rights activists, culture has been “demonised” as tantamount to “unfreedom” (Sen 1999; Englund 2004); culture, in this view, is a disguise through which entrenched forms of power and exploitation operate, and a way of naturalizing cultural systems that prevents people from realising their full humanity.

Human rights, on the other hand, has been critiqued by anthropologists as a purported universal framing of humanity that conceals metropolitan values, epistemology and interests. Although anthropology and human rights discourse have both been challenged as the metropolitan colonisation of local identity, today the concept of human rights has become a key site of global regimes of accountability as well as a plethora of local struggles over resources, the public voice and the management of the self. As a result, moral and political capital have crystallised around human rights today as both a form of advocacy and a mode of local empowerment.

Yet, as Riles (2006) notes, anthropological concepts of cultural difference and universal demands for human rights are not simply antagonistic. The contemporary linkage between global forms of governance and human rights regimes has generated its own anxieties and scepticism within the human rights world, and it is here, Riles suggests, that culture and human rights are mutually oriented towards each other.  In the face of this anxiety, culture is not only a set of practices against which rights must be asserted, but culture is increasingly also the ground from which rights take on their meaning. From the point of view of culture, however, rights is the contemporary ‘outside’ that allows the agents of culture to intervene; to rework their own cultural fabric. In this respect, it is intriguing that rights-based perspectives represent significant competition to the long-standing role played by political economy as the outside of culture.

For anthropologists the effects of this symbiotic relationship between culture and human rights can be traced at a number of different levels. The relationship between anthropology and human rights has been a key point of debate in the development of anthropological codes of ethics. Human rights, in its discursive and institutional contexts, has become another thematic aspect of anthropologists’ subject matter – rights have been assimilated to culture. The capacity to participate in the dialogue between rights and culture has become integral to the political negotiation of fieldwork in many contemporary contexts, and of its ethical evaluation. It is also the primary discursive frame of a contemporary public anthropology – in the Australian context, the politics of anthropology’s engagement in the broader debate about the state ‘intervention’ in the governance of indigenous communities is particularly revealing. Finally, the increasing interpenetration of rights-based and development-oriented forms of critical inquiry and activism has meant that anthropology’s role in the social science division of labour, in both applied and teaching contexts, is mediated by rights discourse. Nevertheless, distinctively historical and political perspectives in anthropological writing have also generated substantial critiques, not only of human rights discourse, but of the ways it has been mobilised in particular social and political contexts.