REQUIRED READINGS

All required readings are available electronically on iLearn and/or E-reserve. There is no book or reader available for purchase. If you would like a hardcopy of the readings, you are free to print these readings on your own.

OUTLINE OF LECTURES & READINGS

Please note that minor modifications to the readings might occur during the semester. Adequate warning will always precede these adjustments

Week 1: 24 February Introduction to Culture and Human Rights After going over the unit outline, the second hour of seminar we will set out some of key the terms, themes, and problems we address over the course of the semester. We will pay particular attention to the significance of approaching questions of rights and culture from an anthropological point of view. The characteristic task of anthropology as a discipline, many have observed, is to make the strange familiar and the familiar strange. In the coming weeks we will attempt to apply these strategies to such foundational concepts as culture, the human, and rights via a focus on striking case studies that unsettle our usual perceptions of the world.

Readings:

1. T. Asad (2000) “What do Human Rights Do?” Theory and Event (online journal).

Week 2: 3 March The Making of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Historical and Intellectual Context. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in 1948 by the General Assembly of the United Nations, represents a moment of signal importance in the recent development of human rights discourse and practice in the West and on a broader global stage. Yet the intellectual and historical roots of the Declaration stretch deep into both Western and non- Western intellectual traditions. In seminar, we will delve into both the distant philosophical antecedents and the proximate geopolitical influences that shaped the making of this important document, looking in particular at the role of specifically “Western” forms in its creation and the impact of the legacies of World War II and the Holocaust on the making of the document.

Readings:

1. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) [freely available online] 2. A. Padgen (2003) Human Rights, Natural Rights and Europe’s Imperial Legacy,

Political Theory, 31(2): 171-199. 3. E. Kalny (2009) Revisiting the Debate 60 Years after the Adoption of the Universal

Declaration of Human Rights, Critique of Anthropology, 29(4): 371-395. 4. S. Waltz (2002) Reclaiming and rebuilding the history of the Universal Declaration

of Human Rights, Third World Quarterly, 23(3): 437-448.

Recommended Readings (optional)

M. Duranti (2012) The Holocaust, the legacy of 1789 and the birth of international human rights law: revisiting the foundation myths, Journal of Genocide Research, 14(2): 159-186.

M. Ishay (2004) What are human rights? Six historical controversies, Journal of Human Rights, 3(3): 359-371.

S. Marks, From the “Single Confused Page” to the “Decalogue for Six Billion Persons:” The Roots of the Universal Declaration of Human rights in the French Revolution, Human Rights Quarterly, 20(3): 459-514.

Week 3: 10 March Anthropology and Human Rights: What is Culture Anyway? The concept of culture, anthropology’s most successful invention, is as ubiquitous as it is poorly understood. In order to understand how common misapprehensions surrounding the concept have impacted human rights in practice, this seminar will deal with the evolution of anthropology’s engagement with human rights from early relativist critiques such as that found in the American Anthropological Association (AAA)’s 1947 Statement on Human Rights to contemporary more activist approaches. We will alsofocus particularly on the anthropological concept of cultural relativism, looking both at its usefulness in breaking down ethnocentric formulations and its limitations. Here we will look at questions surrounding the human rights status of practices of Female Genital Modification/Cutting/ Ritual (FGM/FGC/FGR) as a case study.

Readings:

1. S. Merry (2003), Human Rights Law and the Demonization of Culture (And Anthropology Along the Way), PoLaR, 26(1): 55-76

2. 1947 AAA Statement on Human Rights. American Anthropologist, 49(4): 539-543. 3. A. Gupta and J. Ferguson, Beyond “Culture”: Space, Identity and the Politics of

Difference, Cultural Anthropology, 7(1): 6-23. 4. M. Goodale (2006) Introduction to “Anthropology and Human Rights in a New

Key,” American Anthropologist, 108(1): 1-8.

4. N. Ehrenreich and M. Barr (2005) Intersex Surgery, Female Genital Cutting and the Selective Condemnation of “Cultural Practices,” Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review, 40: 71-140.

Recommended Readings (optional):

M. Brown (2008) Cultural Relativism 2.0, Current Anthropology, 49(3):363-383. S. Johnsdotter (2012) Projected Cultural Histories of Cutting of Female Genitalia: A

Poor Reflection as in a Mirror, History and Anthropology, 23(1): 91-104.

E. Messer (1993) Anthropology and Human Rights, Annual Review of Anthropology, 22: 221-49.

R. Shweder (2000) What about “Female Genital Mutilation?” And Why Understanding Culture Matters in the First Place, Daedalus 129(4): 209-232.

T. Turner (1997) Human Rights, Human Difference: Anthropology's Contribution to an Emancipatory Cultural Politics, Journal of Anthropological Research, 53(3) 273-291.

Week 4: 17 March The Limits of the Human, Concepts and Case Studies What kinds of beings do discourses of human rights presume as their holders? How have concepts of what it means to be human varied by time and place? How should such variation affect our understandings of apparently universal concepts? In this week’s meeting, we will explore two themes in parallel: those excluded from contemporary and historical ideas of rights and liberties and apparently paradoxical cases (that may include but are not limited to those conjoined twins, fetal rights and the globalization of childhood) that trouble easy common sense visions of shared humanity. By doing so the “human” in human rights itself comes to be seen as a kind of political project.

Readings:

1. Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen (1791). Widely available online.

2. J.S. Mill (1859) On Liberty, Introduction. Available widely on the internet.

3. S. Bamford (2007) Embodiments of Detachment, pp. 80-116 in Biology Unmoored: Melanesian Reflections on Life and Biotechnology (Berkeley: University of California Press)

4. M. Bratton, S. Chetwynd (2004) One into two will not go: conceptualising conjoined twins, J Med Ethics, 30:279–285

5. Copelon, et. al (2005) Human Rights Begin at Birth: International Law and the Claim of Fetal Rights, Reproductive Health Matters, 13(26): 120-129.

Recommended Readings (optional):

D. Rosen (2007) Child Soldiers, International Humanitarian Law, and the Globalization of Childhood, American Anthropologist, 109(2): 296-306.

Further Primary Documents

American Declaration of Independence (1776) Declaration of the Rights of Man (1789)

Week 5: 24 March Rights, the Social Lives of a Concept

This week’s seminar explores rights as culture—treating them not as given in nature or independent from human meaning-making or politics but as specific historically, socially and geographically situated cultural forms. What are the consequences of such an unmooring. Does revealing rights as cultural constructions necessarily rob them of their power. Or can learning how rights come to function or indeed become legible in particular contexts provide us with useful information about how to organize future interventions?

Readings:

1. P. Shipton (2003) Legalism and Loyalism: European, African, and Human Rights, in B. Dean and J. Levi, eds., At the Risk of Being Heard (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press).

2. J. Cowan (2006) Culture and Rights after Culture and Rights, American Anthropologist, 108(1): 9-24.

3. R. Williams (2006) Afterword to “Anthropology and Human Rights in a New Key”: The Social Life of Human Rights, American Anthropologist, 108(1) 77-83.

4. M. Somers and C. Roberts (2008) Toward a New Sociology of Rights: A Genealogy of “Buried Bodies” of Citizenship and Human Rights. Annual Review of Law and Social Science 4: 385-425.

Recommended Readings (optional):

L. Abu Lughod (2010) The Active Social Life of “Muslim Women’s Rights”: A Plea for Ethnography, Not Polemic, Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, 6(1): 1-45.

Further Primary Documents

International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966) International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (1966)

Week 6: 31 March Human Rights, some Influential Critiques

Objections to human rights have been made on the grounds of Asian, African, Islamic and Socialist Values. To what extent might these and other critiques be pertinent and to what extent are they based on flawed concepts of culture? How has human rights incorporated the concerns of multiple sets of actors into various generations of (blue, red and green) rights? On what basis might human rights practice proceed in the absence of a universal language of rights? These and related questions will be the central focus of this week’s meeting.

Readings:

1. U. Baxi, (1986) From Human Rights to the Right to be Human: Some Heresies. India International Centre Quarterly, 13(3/4): 185-200.

2. J. Cobbah (1987) African Values and the Human Rights Debate: An African Perspective, Human Rights Quarterly, 9(3): 309-331.

3. D. Bell (1996) The East Asian Challenge to Human Rights: Reflections on an East West Dialogue, Human Rights Quarterly, 18(3): 641-667.

4. D. Kennedy (2002) The International Human Rights Movement: Part of the Problem? Harv. Hum. Rts. J 15: 101-125.

Primary Documents

Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam (1990) Bangkok Declaration — Final Declaration of the Regional Meeting for Asia of the World Conference on Human Rights (1993) — widely available online

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*RECESS (3 April – 19 April)* ____________________________________________________________________

Week 7: 21 April “Universal” Rights, Local Practices This week we look closely at efforts by human rights activists and others to translate would be “universal” rights into particular local contexts. Here we are particularly concerned with the politics of translation and with identifying the particular contribution anthropological research can make to the implementation and understanding of human rights frameworks in non-Western contexts. Ethnographic research can play a crucial role in understanding how best to bring local, translocal and would be universal knowledges and practices together. In all of this, we necessarily must examine the history and limits of the “universal” that we currently inhabit.

Readings:

1. A. Tsing (2005) Introduction, pp. 1-21 in Friction: An Anthropology of Global Connection (Princeton: Princeton University Press).

2. S. Merry (2006) Transnational Human Rights and Local Activism: Mapping the Middle, American Anthropologist, 108(1):38-51.

3. C. Archambault (2011) Ethnographic Empathy and the Social Context of Rights: “Rescuing” Maasai Girls from Early Marriage. American Anthropologist, 113(4): 632-643.

4. J. Ledgerwood and K. Un (2003) Global concepts and local meaning: human rights and Buddhism in Cambodia, Journal of Human Rights, 2(4): 531-549.

Primary Documents

Vienna Declaration and Program of Action (1993)

Recommended Readings (optional):

M. Goodhart (2008) Neither Relative nor Universal: A Response to Donnelly, Human Rights Quarterly, 30: 183-193.

Week 8: 28 April Human Rights and Security since 9/11: Progress or Retreat? How have contemporary geo-political circumstances affected the progress of human rights? In this first of two weeks that address this question, we will explore the effects of the War on Terror on human rights since 2001. In a context of increasing global instability should rights or security be prioritized? To what degree should civil and political rights such as the freedom of speech and of assembly be protected and to what degree should they be sacrificed to ensure safety. To what degree can anti-terrorist rhetoric authorize racism or state oppression? How should human rights activists best approach such conundrums? These and related questions will lie at the center of this week’s discussion.

Readings:

1. P. Hoffman (2004) Human Rights and Terrorism, Human Rights Quarterly, 26(4): 932-955.

2. M. Mamdani (2002) Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: A Political Perspective on Culture and Terrorism, American Anthropologist, 104(3): 766-775.

3. M. Clarke (2010) Widening the Net: China’s anti-terror laws and human rights in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, The International Journal of Human Rights, 14(4): 542-558.

4. L. Volpp (2002) The Citizen and the Terrorist, UCLA Law Review, 49: 1575-1600.

Primary Documents

Racial Discrimination of Act of 1975 (especially section 18)

Foreign Fighters Bill

Recommended Readings (optional):

M. Denike (2008) The Human Rights of Others: Sovereignty, Legitimacy and “Just Causes” for the “War on Terror. Hypatia, 23(2): 95-121

Week 9: 5 May Are Global Capitalism and Human Rights Compatible? In terms of economic integration, today’s world is, in some respects, radically different from that of 1948. Since the end of the Cold War in 1989 and the rise of China over the last two decades, economic and cultural globalization have increased dramatically in intensity. Yet this increasing intensification of global linkages has not (yet) resulted in a global expansion of uniform labor rights to the world’s workers. This week we will continue our examination of the effects of the contemporary scene on human rights practices and possibilities via a thoughtful examination of the cases for and against sweatshops. Is it possible to argue for their benefits without resorting to a naive cultural relativism? Is it possible to conceptualize alternatives to the histories of western states’ own troubled economic development? To what extent should a “Right to Development” trump civil or political rights? Issues of universalism and relativism will be central to our analysis of these debates.

Readings:

1. N. Kristof and S. WuDunn (2000) Two Cheers for Sweatshops, New York Times, September 24.

2. M. Yglesias (2013) Different Places have Different Safety Rules and that’s Okay. Slate, April 24.

3. J. Collins (2007) The Rise of a Global Garment Industry and the Reimagination of Worker Solidarity, Critique of Anthropology, 27(4): 395-409

4. Hong Xue and A. Chan (2013) The Global Value Chain, Critical Asian Studies, 45(1): 55-77.

Recommended Readings (optional):

J. Miller (2003) Why Economists Are Wrong About Sweatshops and the Antisweatshop Movement, Challenge, 46(1): 93-122.

B. Powell (2014) Meet the Old Sweatshops: Same as the New, Independent Review, 19(1): 109-122.

O. Nieuwenhuys (1996) The Paradox of Child Labor and Anthropology, Annual Review of Anthropology, 25: 237-251.

Week 10: 12 May Global Indigeneity: Universalism, Relativism and the Right to Difference This week we will discuss what are often term third generation human rights, rights that are linked to a community rather than to an individual. In particular we explore recent articulations of indigenousness as a cultural basis for rights claims. We do so in two ways, first considering the ways in which Indigenous Rights activists may put culture to use for their particular political purposes and, second, the ways in which the idea of indigeneity itself has emerged as a particular sort of cultural form over the last several decades. Particularly worthy of note here are two ironies— the degree to which the apparent universalism of contemporary Indigenism is susceptible to the same sort of relativist critiques as universal human rights and the extent to which idealized visions of a universal Indigene have in some instances crowded the complexities of everyday life out of the picture.

Readings:

1. R. Sylvain (2002) “Land, Water and Truth”: San Identity and Global Indigenism, American Anthropologist, 104(4): 1074-185.

2. E. Yeh (2007) Tibetan Indigeneity: Translations, Resemblances, and Uptake, pp. 69-97 in O. Starn and M. de la Cadena, eds., Indigenous Experience Today (Bloomsbury Academic).

3. A. Kuper (2003) Return of the Native, Current Anthropology, 44(3): 389-402. 4. F. Merlan (2009) Indigeneity: Local and Global, Current Anthropology, 50(3): 303-333.

Primary Documents

1999 American Anthropological Association Statement on Human Rights United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (2007)

Recommended Readings (optional):

A. Muehlebach (2001) “Making Place” at the United Nations: Indigenous Cultural Politics at the U.N. Working Group on Indigenous Populations, Cultural Anthropology, 16(3): 415-448

Week 11: 19 May Human Rights and Animal Rights What, if anything, makes human beings special? What separates us from other animals? We have seen over the course of the semester how the line between the human and the non- human has been crucial to concepts of rights and liberty. We have also seen how it has been redrawn both consciously and unconsciously at particular moments in time. This week we explore the potential ramifications for human rights of the further redrawings of this distinction that may be underway at present. In particular we ask what place non-human animals might have in future constellations of human rights. We look in particular at one area where rights to cultural heritage and the concerns of the global environmentalist movement come into conflict: “traditional” hunting, whaling and other “subsistence” practices of indigenous peoples. Focusing on the whale hunt of the Makah people in America’s Pacific Northwest, we will consider how best to allocate rights in situations that navigate in uncertain fashion the boundary between human and animal rights.

Readings:

1.R. Van Ginkel (2004) The Makah Whale Hunt and Leviathan’s Death: Reinventing Tradition and Disputing Authenticity in the Age of Modernity, Etnofoor, 17(1/2) 58-89.

2. R. Van Ginkel (2005) Killing Giants of the Sea: Contentious Heritage and the Politics of Culture, Journal of Mediterranean Studies, 15(1): 71-98.

3. G. Wenzel (1991) Introduction, pp. 1-9 in Animal Rights, Human Rights: Ecology, Economy and Ideology in the Canadian Arctic (Toronto: University of Toronto Press.)

Recommended Readings (optional):

P. Nadasdy (2007) The Gift in the Animal: The Ontology of Hunting and Human- Animal Sociality. American Ethnologist, 34(1): 25-43.

R. Reeves (2002) The origins and character of ‘aboriginal subsistence’ whaling: a global review, Mammal Rev., 32(2): 71-106.

Week 12 26 May No Class; work on your research essays!

Week 13: 2 June What Comes After Human Rights? In the final week of the semester, we explore possible futures for human rights as imagined by both critics and supporters. Depending on whom one believes, human rights are either thriving, doomed or some combination of the two. Presenting the cases for both sides in lecture, we ask you to make your own informed decision about whether Human Rights as a project should be commended, amended, or abandoned. In particular we will explore diverging answers to the question of whether relations between Human Rights regimes and state power have become too cozy and what (if anything) would be lost by shifting to a focus on human welfare, human needs or harm mitigation as possible alternative frameworks for intervention.

Readings:

1. C. Douzinas (2014) The End(s) of Human Rights, Melb U. L. Rev., 26: 445-465. 2. A. Langlois (2012) Human Rights in Crisis? A Critical Polemic Against Polemic

Critics, Journal of Human Rights, 11: 558-570. 3 .J. Zigon (2013) Human Rights as Moral Progress? A Critique, Cultural

Anthropology, 28(4): 716-736

4. E. Posner (2008) Human Welfare, not Human Rights, Columbia Law Review, 108(7): 1758-1801.