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Surrendering to Utopia: An Anthropology of Human Rights
Abstract
Surrendering to Utopia is a critical and wide-ranging study of anthropology's contributions to human rights. Providing a unique window into the underlying political and intellectual currents that have shaped human rights in the postwar period, this ambitious work opens up new opportunities for research, analysis, and political action. At the book's core, the author describes a "well-tempered human rights,"an orientation to human rights in the twenty-first century that is shaped by a sense of humility, an appreciation for the disorienting fact of multiplicity, and a willingness to make the mundaneness of social practice a source of ethical inspiration. In examining the curious history of anthropology's engagement with human rights, this book moves from more traditional anthropological topics within the broader human rights community, for example, relativism and the problem of culture, to consider a wider range of theoretical and empirical topics. Among others, it examines the link between anthropology and the emergence of "neoliberal" human rights, explores the claim that anthropology has played an important role in legitimizing these rights, and gauges whether or not this is evidence of anthropology's potential to transform human rights theory and practice more generally.
... Anthropologists have increasingly engaged in social problem solving, and anthropology associations have endorsed the engagement of anthropologists as social watchdogs to identify and denounce inequalities (Goodale 2009;Sillitoe 2015). ...
... Isso pode estar ligado ao fato de o objeto da antropologia clássica ter sobrevivido durante muito tempo nas "comunidades de pequena escala", das quais surgiram idéias de respeito à diferença/relativismo cultural e diversidade dos povos (Cf. GOODALE, 2009;ORTIZ, 2015), pressupostos estes que foram neutralizados pelos Estados e governos africanos pós-Independências em virtude da imposta "unidade/identidade nacional" e "apressada modernização homogênea" naquelas sociedades do continente negro (Cf. BENOT Vol. ...
Este empreendimento, cuja incidência geo-etnográfica recai sobre Muhlabje – um dos bairros do Município de Macia, sul de Moçambique –, tenta compreender as relações sociais e dinâmicas políticas que movimentam as pessoas, as redes sociais da comunidade e as autoridades bantu-mocambicanas e estas, na mesma via das interações políticas, com a burocracia e política municipal, sem perder de vista as instituições sociais simultaneamente contínuas e em mudanças, naquela comunidade, precedentes e em movimento com a dominação colonial e com Moçambique pós-Independente. O argumento desdobra-se, ainda, em capturar as situações sociais entrelaçadas umas com as outras num fluxo contínuo e transdinâmico, ou seja, o culto dos antepassados, a cerimônia pelos heróis moçambicanos, os ganhos de agricultura, a compra e venda de um terreno, o vinho doado à comunidade pelos políticos e os produtos de agricultura doados pela comunidade aos políticos e burocratas e as festas locais são atividades-institutos sociais que cortam transversalmente as supostas divisões institucionais da burocracia republicana impessoal e (em contraposição às) relações interpessoais (Município e comunidades [neopatrimonialismo/clientelismo]), razão pela qual esse fluxo ganha o conceito de reciprocidades burocrático-transinstitucionais.
... New approaches to legal anthropology retain the discipline's long-standing focus on local legal institutions and procedures, while expanding its scale to increasingly global sites and investigations of transnational legal processes (Wilson 2001;Clarke 2006;Merry 2006Merry , 2016Goodale 2009). They propose the adoption of a more expansive and global perspective in law and society research to move beyond state-centric or state-framed interpretations of law (Darian-Smith 2013;Massoud 2015). ...
For a legal anthropologist interested in how different agents and forms of governance shape projects of sexual humanitarianism, the strategies that US-funded non-governmental organizations (NGOs) use in their attempts to reframe an Indian anti-prostitution law as an anti-trafficking instrument generate broader conceptual questions. How do Indian NGOs articulate donor-driven concerns with the postcolonial socio-legal framework within which they work? What impact do they seek to have on the law, legal system, and legal actors? What, in turn, happens to formal law, which is already shaped by a complex history of legal concerns, moral panics, and NGO intervention (itself authorized by law) in this context? How do law and NGOs shape each other across anti-prostitution and anti-trafficking projects in the overlapping contexts of postcoloniality, globalization, neoliberalism, and sexual humanitarianism in India? How might one explore these intersections and relationships methodologically? I show how ethnography at the intersection of anti-prostitution law and anti-trafficking NGOs illuminates: (1) law’s imbrication in a broader, long-standing, and ever-expanding field of governmental action on prostitution; (2) how NGOs and legal actors act, in tension and in collaboration, upon the perceived “problem” of prostitution; and (3) how anti-trafficking NGOs and anti-prostitution law co-constitute each other as they shape contested meanings around prostitution.
... Nuestra utopía en la antropología -por lo menos, entre la mayoría de los y las colegas -es la de la emancipación (Goodale 2009): intentamos, a menudo, fortalecer las comunidades y sociedades que han sufrido represalias, marginalización, y discriminación, como es el caso de casi todos los pueblos indígenas durante la historia del colonialismo, hasta el presente. Tendemos, por Pachamama. ...
[ESPANOL ABAJO] This is an epilogue written – in Spanish – to reflect certain topics as raised in the volume “Ontologías musicales y sonoras en Bolivia” (= Contrapunto 2:2022). It however goes beyond a simple commentary and tackles a sequence of topics relevant for anthropology and musicology: ethnography, ontologies, researchers’ intentions and reciprocal research by Indigenous peoples, and especially the belief in utopia – by researchers, researched, and readers.
[ESPANOL] Este es un epílogo escrito para reflexionar sobre ciertos temas planteados en el volumen "Ontologías musicales y sonoras en Bolivia" (= Contrapunto 2:2022). Sin embargo, va más allá de un simple comentario y aborda una serie de temas relevantes para la antropología y la musicología: la etnografía, las ontologías, las intenciones de los investigadores y la investigación recíproca por parte de los pueblos indígenas y, especialmente, la creencia en la utopía por parte de investigadores, investigados y lectores.
... Para outros contributos em torno desta aproximação, sob diversos pontos de vista, veja-se, e.g.,Brunetto, 2014;Bertoldi & Sposato, 2011;Sahinkuye, 2011;Ramiro Avilés & Cuenca Gómez, 2010;Goodale, 2009;Herkenhoff, 1997;Nickel, 1982. ...
Modern state law excludes populations, peoples, and social groups by making them invisible, irrelevant, or dangerous. In this book, Boaventura de Sousa Santos offers a radical critique of the law and develops an innovative paradigm of socio-legal studies which is based on the historical experience of the Global South. He traces the history of modern law as an abyssal law, or a kind of law that is theoretically invisible yet implements profound exclusions in practice. This abyssal line has been the key procedure used by modern modes of domination – capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy – to divide people into two groups, the metropolitan and the colonial, or the fully human and the sub-human. Crucially, de Sousa Santos rejects the decadent pessimism that claims that we are living through 'the end of history'. Instead, this book offers practical, hopeful alternatives to social exclusion and modern legal domination, aiming to make post-abyssal legal utopias a reality.
Anthropological approaches in international law have been ignored for centuries. The main area of interest is to emphasize indigenous peoples and account for their vulnerabilities in the development of international law. However, shifting from the ideology behind the concept of international law to global law is a crucial debate, for example, global human rights law, global criminal law, global administrative law, global environmental law, global health law, and the law of global governance. This chapter officially considers revitalizing anthropological approaches for rethinking and relearning the international legal spaces. Moreover, it provides a comprehensive understanding of global legal pluralism in terms of the widely accepted current development of global legal thinking and pedagogies. Overall, this chapter provides an introduction to transforming the global concept of justice.KeywordsAnthropological approach in international lawGlobal administrative lawGlobal environmental lawCultural relativism
Zusammenfassung
Der Beitrag setzt sich mit den von Philosophen und Rechtsexperten nach dem 2. Weltkrieg geführten Diskussionen auseinander, die schließlich zur Ausarbeitung der Allgemeinen Erklärung der Menschenrechte führten. Die komplexen Abläufe werden aufgezeigt, bei denen zwischen hochrangigen Vertretern aus verschiedenen Kulturen um das Verständnis des Universalismus gerungen wurde und Positionen des vom Westen vorgegebenen Narrativs hinterfragt wurden.
Zusammenfassung
Kultur nimmt in der zweiten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts in Wissenschaft und Politik als Antwort auf die zweite Phase der Globalisierung, die sogenannte reflexive Moderne, eine herausragende Bedeutung ein. Der Beitrag diskutiert die in den letzten 50 Jahren eingetretenen Veränderungen der Internationalen Ordnung und ihre neuen Instrumente universeller Kulturpolitik anhand des soziologischen Systembegriffs von Talcott Parsons. Untersucht wird das jeweilige Verständnis von Multilateralismus und Universalismus von zwei der wichtigsten Beitragszahler der Vereinten Nationen: Deutschland und China. Und dargelegt wird das von der UNESCO entwickelte Modell einer humanen Zukunftsgesellschaft, das aus den Turbulenzen der krisengeschüttelten globalen Risikogesellschaft führen könnte: Das Konzept der nachhaltiger Wissensgesellschaften für das 21. Jahrhundert.
This chapter aims to show how the cultural incompleteness of Western secularization, with specific regard to legal categories, affects the neutrality of state law before religious and cultural minorities. In opposition to Schmitt’s focus on the public/institutional features of ‘Political Theology’, I examine the resilience of Christian moral theology inside the legal categories related to the quotidian life of people: property law, legal capacity, contract law, law of obligations, corporation law, market law, inheritance law, criminal law and specifically forms of crime and intentionality of criminal action, the idea and the justification of criminal sanctions, and so on. I call this area of Christian ethical and conceptual resilience ‘legal theology.’ On the following pages, I argue that the rationalization of Christian moral theology and its legal projections carried out through modernity has remained largely incomplete because it merely removed the theological garments from legal institutes leaving their semantic inner structure almost unaltered. Although modern secularization greatly impinged on the institutional public and political structures of the Ancien Régime, it nevertheless preserved the pre-existing grammar of legal subjectivity. Of course, this kind of resilience was very difficult to see because of the deep continuity between culture and legal imagery extant during the Middle Ages in Europe. The encounter with cultural Otherness and its alienating effects in a sense brings that religious resilience to the surface and, above all, makes visible the cultural relativity of the Western legal lexicon. If during the colonization era the unveiling action exerted by contact with Otherness was (relatively) silenced because of the imbalance of power and the imperialist attitude of the European colonizers, today things have changed. The spread of human rights ideals and the diffusion of democratic practices spur and legitimate cultural and religious minorities to make claims for their social and legal inclusion. The Non-Western non-Christian minorities struggle against the lack of neutrality of the Western national legal systems and their historically driven attitude to pass off their identity as universality. The specific purpose of this chapter is to argue that democratic reflexivity and responsiveness can only be assured within Western multicultural and multi-religious societies by means of a historical-semiotic rethinking of the secularization process (and, symmetrically, the attempts to transplant it in Non-Western countries.) In this vein, I propose the idea of an intercultural secularization, which is to be intended not so much as the achievement of a radical (impossible) neutrality of the legal grammar as rather the outcome of a polyphonic intercultural effort of translation/transaction among cultural and religious differences. In this sense, the secular ideal of a religiously neutral (nay: purely ‘rational’) state law should be replaced by the more modest aspiration to a legal apparatus, which might be at least equidistant from the different cultural and religious social actors. The final goal of this work of intercultural translation/transaction is the creation of an intercultural legal lexicon capable of overarching and reflecting, as a kind of semiotic dome, the dynamic interplay of cultural and religious differences that are always present in the social field of national states.
There is a stark contradiction between the theory of universal human rights and the everyday practice of human wrongs. This timely volume investigates whether human rights abuses are a result of the failure of governments to live up to a universal human rights standard, or whether the search for moral universals is a fundamentally flawed enterprise which distracts us from the task of developing rights in the context of particular ethical communities. In the first part of the book chapters by Ken Booth, Jack Donnelly, Chris Brown, Bhikhu Parekh and Mary Midgley explore the philosophical basis of claims to universal human rights. In the second part, Richard Falk, Mary Kaldor, Martin Shaw, Gil Loescher, Georgina Ashworth and Andrew Hurrell reflect on the role of the media, global civil society, states, migration, non-governmental organisations, capitalism, and schools and universities in developing a global human rights culture.
Against the backdrop of South Africa's transition from apartheid, this provocative book explores the role of late twentieth century constitutionalism in facilitating political change. Using South Africa as a case study, Klug's larger project is to investigate why there has been renewed faith in justiciable constitutions and democratic constitutionalism despite the widespread recognition that courts are institutionally weak, lack adequate resources and are largely inaccessible to most citizens. He places this question in a broader context, evaluating the appeal of different constitutional models and illustrating how globalized institutions can be adapted to serve local domestic needs. Incorporating constitutional law, politics and legal history, this examination of South Africa's constitution-making process provides important insights into the role of law in the transition to democracy.
Do people everywhere have the same, or even compatible, ideas about multiculturalism, indigenous rights or women's rights? The authors of this book move beyond the traditional terms of the universalism versus cultural relativism debate. Through detailed case-studies from around the world (Hawaii, France, Thailand, Botswana, Greece, Nepal and Canada) they explore the concrete effects of rights talk and rights institutions on people's lives.
Do people everywhere have the same, or even compatible, ideas about multiculturalism, indigenous rights or women's rights? The authors of this book move beyond the traditional terms of the universalism versus cultural relativism debate. Through detailed case-studies from around the world (Hawaii, France, Thailand, Botswana, Greece, Nepal and Canada) they explore the concrete effects of rights talk and rights institutions on people's lives.