Virtual Library

This essay reviews what anthropologists have contributed to the human rights framework and how they have used it for research and advocacy.

This article questions the characterization of the 1999 Declaration as a complete turnaround by studying the role that the 1947 Statement has played in the development of anthropological views on human rights. In particular, it takes a diachronic look at the institutional actions of the AAA of the 1940s and those of the 1990s by comparing the 1947 Statement with the 1999 Declaration. It also compares responses to the Statement in the 1940s with those in the 1990s, exploring various ways that anthropologists have reacted to the Boasian cultural relativism that is generally considered to be embodied in the Statement. I argue that, despite their many disclaimers of the Statement (generally voiced as embarrassment), today’s pro-rights anthropologists continue to struggle with the same issues that the 1947 AAA Board confronted regarding the limits of tolerance. In particular, the question of how one might be a cultural relativist and still make overt political judgments guides today’s Human Rights Committee in much the same way it guided the 1947 Board. (excerpt pg. 537)

In this paper, I examine the relationship between sociology and the human rights dis- course. A major segment of the discourse is between Western and nonwestern scholars join- ing the debate from a wide variety of disciplines including law, political science, economics, and demography (Ake 1987; An-Na’im and Deng 1990; Ihonvbere 1994; Kabeer 1994; Mutua 1995; Sen, et al. 1994; Xing 1996, etc.). Sociology has made a poor showing. Perhaps this is due to the more general problem that the discipline, as a whole, lags behind others in applying itself to the human rights debate. Sjoberg and Vaughan argue that sociological theory has hardly been brought to bear on human rights issues. They are worried about “the intellectual myopia of contemporary sociologists regarding human rights” (1993:114). At Žrst glance, sociology appears to be in a strategic position to grapple with human rights issues given its focus on the maintenance of social order, social change, and the construction of new institu- tions. All these can be brought to bear on the problem of human rights.

This article examines how judicial human rights in Europe have adopted the security politics that have swept across Europe in recent years and how, through the European Court of Human Rights’ (ECtHR)decision‐making over the veil they have contributed to the precarity of the Muslim woman’s body. While suffering from stigmatization through securitization of the veil (I am using ‘veil’ to describe various garments such as the hijab, niqab and burqa. For the purposes of this article, this is a useful shorthand), covered Muslim women’s (The concept of Muslim women is a misnomer because it suggests that Muslim women constitute a homogeneous group when they are not. Without denying their heterogeneity, its use here is suggestive of the way it is used by securitizing agents and narratives) attempts at strategic human rights litigation against bans on their clothing, including landmark cases such as SAS v. France, have failed. Institutional human rights in Europe have hijacked national governments’ security narratives and thus been complicit in furthering the bodily vulnerability of covered Muslim women by sanctioning the public stripping of their clothing. This transgresses human rights’ fundamental, normative, commitment to preventing bodily wounding. It exposes the conditionality and limitation of judicial human rights and endorses an idealized version of the exposed woman as free and equal. Moreover, by abandoning its role as neutral arbiter or audience, the ECtHR exposes human rights’ ongoing link with neo‐colonialism. The Court’s decision‐making raises the question of how veiled women might mobilize to desecuritize the veil. I suggest a return to the politics of rights combined with the “rebellious cosmopolitanism” resonant with Camus’ politics to mount relentless protests against governance feminism and the Eurocentrism of institutional human rights for a return to “normal politics”.

This paper examines sociologists' current interest in the topics of human rights and globalisation. Some descnbe a world where everyone has rights (or at least a modicum of rights), because we are all human, and we all interact and communicate with one another in a global environment which will (it is argued), result in greater toleration and recognition of differences. In contrast, this paper emphasises the political instability of rights in a world characterised by vast economic inequalities which does not fit neatly into some of the visions of international or global community being proposed. Rather than the inevitability of rights discourse, I argue that it is the force of law that demands human problems be cast in the language of rights and rights language is legal language. Nonetheless, there has been relatively little attention paid by sociologists to the institutions, especially courts, for example, that will recognise and enforce those rights designated as human rights. The paper closes with some suggestions for further sociological endeavour in this regard.

Norbert Elias suggested that ‘civilization’ involves the transformation of human habitus so that violence of all sorts is gradually subjected to greater and more sophisticated forms of management and control, whereas ‘decivilization’ encompasses processes which produce an increase in violence and a breakdown in the stability and consistency of on‐going social relations. What remains unexplored is the extent to which ‘civilizing offensives’, the self‐conscious attempts to bring about ‘civilization’, have revolved around essentially violent policies and practices. This paper examines the systematic removal of indigenous Australian children from their families, largely for the social engineering purpose of the gradual and systematic annihilation of Aboriginal cultural identity. At the time, these policies and practices were constructed by most observers as contributing to the ‘welfare’ of Australian Aborigines, and this intersection of welfare and violence raises the possibility that civilization and decivilization, rather than being different processes which may or may not run alongside each other, interpenetrate each other so that, under certain circumstances, societies are ‘barbaric’ precisely in their movement towards increasing civilization. It may also be possible to describe the move away from the systematic removal of Aboriginal children since the 1970s as itself part of a civilizing process, an increasing recognition of the human rights of Australian Aborigines and of the inhumanity of those policies and practices. The paper concludes by addressing the implications for theories of civilization and decivilization, as well as more generally for our contemporary understanding of what it means to be a ‘civilized’ modern citizen.

A recurring theme in the sociology of human rights is the vast decoupling that exists between the formal codification of these rights in principle and their implementation in practice, fueling much debate about the effectiveness of international law. Yet, despite this disjuncture, a deeper question remains: given all the barriers that have impeded the realization of human rights, why have they become so widely institutionalized? Revisiting previous work in this journal, I argue that one important component of the expansion of human rights is the rise of the universal, egalitarian individual as the primary entity of social organization in world society. Additionally, I explore how the nature of human rights law itself promotes widespread decoupling that, in turn, fuels ongoing efforts to close the gap between principle and practice. Indeed, while human rights law envisions an ideal world that is practically unrealizable, it inspires a never-ending, global crusade to bring about that vision.

Understanding how the idea of culture is mobilized in discursive contests is crucial for both theorizing and building multicultural democracies. To investigate this, I analyze a debate over whether we should relieve the “cultural need” for infibulation among immigrants by offering a “nick” in U.S. hospitals. Using interviews, newspaper coverage, and primary documents, I show that physicians and opponents of the procedure with contrasting models of culture disagreed on whether it represented cultural change. Opponents argued that the “nick” was fairly described as “female genital mutilation” and symbolically identical to more extensive cutting. Using a reified model, they imagined Somalis to be “culture-bound”; the adoption of a “nick” was simply a move from one genital cutting procedure to another. Unable to envision meaningful cultural adaptation, and presupposing the incompatibility of multiculturalism and feminism, they supported forced assimilation. Physicians, drawing on a dynamic model of culture, believed that adoption of the “nick” was meaningful cultural change, but overly idealized their ability to protect Somali girls from both Somali and U.S. patriarchy. Unduly confident, they failed to take oppression seriously, dismissing relevant constituencies and their concerns. Both models, then, influenced the outcome of this cultural conflict by shaping the perceptions of cultural change in problematic ways. Given the high-profile nature of “culture” in contemporary politics, these findings may very well extend to other issues that crystallize the supposed incommensurability of feminism and multiculturalism, as well as the wider debates about how societies can be both diverse and socially just.

This paper explores various aspects of the problem of perspectivism in Max Weber’s soci- ology as a component of the legacy of Friedrich Nietzsche in order to examine the contri- bution, if any, of sociological thinking to the understanding of human rights. In this inquiry I am more concerned with the theoretical contribution to the analysis of relativism in relation to rights rather than with the sociological analysis of which empirical conditions do or do not promote political respect for the exercise of human rights.

In the torrent of reporting on human rights in recent years far more attention is given to human rights violations in the non-Western world than in Euro-America. How should we explain this imbalance? … [W]e should look at the variable functions of the nation state, the shifting structures of international power, and the moral languages in which injustice is identified and its elimination advocated.