Nigel Rapport, Joanna Overing, Social and Cultural Anthropology - The Key Concepts (2000)

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the matrices of perception of socio-cultural groupings and identify with them completely (cf. Cohen 1994). Hence, individuals come to be analytically treated as incidental to their social relationships and cultural institutions. This, as Cohen sums up, amounts to both flawed social science and complicity in processes of ideological hegemony:

We must make deliberate efforts to acknowledge the subtleties, inflections and varieties of individual consciousness which are concealed by the categorical masks which we have invented so adeptly. Otherwise, we will continue to deny people the right to be themselves, deny their rights to their own identities.

(1994:180)

We must, as analysts, preserve individuals’ rights to their own awareness and thus contribute to the decolonization of the human subject.

To say that it is impossible to consider individuals as bearers of rights independently of group memberships and identities, then, is to risk blinding oneself to those iniquitous failures of social arrangement from which liberalism has served as an escape, and to rob human beings of their best protections against abuses of power. On the other hand, to insist, as liberalism does, that the individual is the benchmark of justice, to believe the morally independent individual to be the ultimate source of value, is to direct the focus of attention to interpersonal ties not bounded groups: to ‘personal communities’, chosen by individuals, not ascribed ones. If community is important in people’s lives, this must be seen to be a voluntary community—of friends, neighbours, family, coworkers, co-ethnics, co-religionists—from which individuals are free to come and go. ‘[I]t is attachment rather than membership that is a general human value’ (Phillips 1993:194); hence what is preferable is an anthropological philosophy which protects the rights of attachment and detachment per se rather than particular (types of) attachments.

This is ‘post-cultural’ inasmuch as it posits individuals as ontologically prior to the cultural milieux which they create and in which they dwell. A post-cultural wisdom recognizes the universal fact of individuality whatever the hegemonic community ideology concerning ‘personhood’. Individual actors are ‘the anthropological concrete’ (Auge 1995:111) and they must remain free voluntarily to adopt or reject any number of cultural personae.

In short, it is important today for anthropologists to appreciate the right of the individual citizen to his or her own civil freedoms against cultural prejudices, against social statuses, and against the language

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embodied in their self-expressions. Hence, human rights have a universal relevance and resonance, and their advocation is a universal responsibility. In an interdependent, ‘post-cultural’ world, human rights represents a discourse offering shared standards of human dignity, with possible procedural implications for forms of global governance.

A comparative anthropology of human rights

If globalization finally bankrupts relativistic arguments, then this is not to say that the global situation becomes one of either standardization or Westernization. Rather, the situation is of global forms being animated, brought to social life and made culturally meaningful, by an endemic process of local and individual interpretation. Thus, out of global relatedness, new diversities are always being constructed.

Indeed, this is perhaps nowhere more visible than in the case of ‘human rights’. In human rights discourse and law, a global form can clearly be seen to be given a diversity of local formulations.Two major transformatory processes are found to be at play: the vernacularization of a set of international legal institutions, and the globalization of local cases of dispute. In ‘a confusion of legal tongues’ (Geertz 1983:220), local, national and transnational codes now overlap and intermix, such that there is no ‘traditional culture’ which is not an ongoing construction by people who find themselves in a pluralistic sociocultural context.

It is precisely this tension between the local and the supra-local which a ‘comparative anthropology of human rights’ study sets out to study: ‘how a transnational discourse and set of legal institutions are materialised, appropriated, resisted and transformed in a variety of contexts’ (Wilson 1997:23). Notions of human rights come to be seen as the results of concrete social struggles, embedded in local normative orders, while yet caught in translocal webs of power. Anthropologically to represent human rights violations, then, is not necessarily to ape the universalistic objectivity of legalistic declarations, nor yet to give in to absolute perspectivism where any representation is as good as any other. Rather, anthropology can judge the appropriateness of particular renditions of concrete examples of violation according to the context of their expression and intended reception. Thus a comparative anthropology of rights can contextualize without relativizing (cf. Clay 1988).

More specifically, according to Wilson (1997), an anthropology of human rights should provide thick descriptions of existential situations: should evidence how experiences of brute existence in particular

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contexts come to be translated into human rights narratives. Thus, anthropology can restore the richness of subjectivities immersed in complex fields of social relations which legalistic accounts of human rights often omit. Situating human rights within socio-cultural milieux, anthropologists can show rights to be grounded, value-laden features of social life and bound to purposive agents. Here are human rights not merely as instrumental mechanisms but as expressive too: constructing local identities, classifying and legitimating claims to self-determination and sovereignty, embodying relations of force and struggles for power between competing interest groups.

In short, anthropologists can chart how human rights are founded, possessed and transformed as complex strategic situations unfold. Hence, while the spread of human rights discourse might seem tantamount to the imperialistic interjection of a Western legal regime, a vibrant diversity and creativity undergirds this seeming globalization such that indigenous rights movements can be found appropriating the discourse as a suitable form for the expression of a vibrant local identity. In this way, the spread of ‘human rights’, albeit originally a liberal discourse, need not produce a historical process (or progress) which Western liberal theorists would immediately recognize. Nevertheless, human rights can be seen to afford a symbolic form of common denomination whereby many different individuals and groups can dialoguize.

Maybe the contextual multiplicity and openness concerning the operationalizing of human rights discourse holds lessons too for the reporting of human rights violations. At present, the genre of such reporting fails to capture the multiplicity of local narratives and subjective constructions of events. In order to produce globally consumable bits (and bytes) of information with an aura of neutrality, authority and legitimacy, decontextualized accounts impose meaning and coherence on what is chaotic and indeterminate; meanwhile, formulaic applications of international rights law can do as much harm as good to local conditions of sustainable fair government. Admittedly, a legalistic language and universal templates are an advantage for the persuading and pressurizing of nation-states. Nonetheless, if the power of human rights agencies is a discursive one, turning on the symbolic capital of certain types of information and denunciation, and if the wider audience for human rights reporting is a variegated one, then the genres of reportage should be carefully selected and likewise various. In this diversity of genres, in fine, existential anthropological accounts may have a large part to play.

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Human rights in a post-cultural world

At the outset of Anthropology as Cultural Critique (1986:vii), Marcus and Fischer posed the provocative question: ‘how is an emergent post-modern world to be represented as an object for social thought?’. Liberal— humanist notions of general humanity now take political precedence over a highlighting of autochthonous difference, while ‘Orientalist’ critique now challenges the perpetration of any form of ‘othering’. Global penetrations of systems of communication and technology mean that the once distant ‘exotic’ informant and lay reader of anthropological texts become coevals, while the extensive movements of populations (labour migrants, refugees and tourists) make the cognitive landscapes of an increasing number of people a global one.To talk of ‘culture’ and ‘intrinsic cultural difference’ in this setting rather than of some form of ‘global ecumene’ could be seen, Marcus and Fischer concluded, as a romantic revelling in inessential minutiae or as an obfuscatory denial of the nature of contemporary social reality (1986:39). It is not that the global ecumene is a homogeneous social space, rather that difference is more than ever an internal relation: of wealth, localism, ethnicity, religiosity, sex and gender within the single social arena or polity.The question for anthropology in this post-cultural environment is both how to write the meeting of internal differences and how to right it.

Perhaps an anthropology of human rights offers a way forward. For, in highlighting the discourse and the laws surrounding human rights as ‘transnational juridical processes’ (Wilson 1997:9), anthropology can point the way towards an appreciation of such rights as perhaps ‘the worlds first universal ideology’ (Weissbrodt 1988:1). That is, human rights, as discourse and law, can be seen as a concrete form of political procedure on which a global liberal polity and justice is to be founded (cf. Rorty 1986). Here is a symbolic form in which the tensions between the global and local may be played out, in which differences between identities are not elided, without thereby losing sight of the ideal of reaching consensus concerning the freedom of individual practice and belief. Anthropology can show how ‘human rights’ is being adopted as a resource in manifold local situations: a means by which identities both come together and remain distinct.

While there is a flexibility in its interpretation, limits are still imposed beyond which ‘violations of human rights’ are identifiable. As a political procedure, ‘human rights’ might say little substantively about the fundamentals of belief which the discourse expresses, but it does not say nothing. As Wilson spells it out (1997:8–9), it does not countenance the maintenance of ‘inegalitarian and repressive political systems’, it does not

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entertain ‘international acquiescence in state repression’, and it does not place culture on the level of supreme ethical value.To the contrary, in a ‘post-cultural world’, as we have seen, the focus is firmly upon culture as optional resource, as a trope of belonging, employed by individual actors on a global stage. In this situation, anthropological accounts, rich in subjectivities and social relations, can show how people the world over engage with human rights discourses and law for the effecting and expression of a diversity of identities. By writing existentialist narratives concerning human rights violations, anthropologists can complement other genres of reporting, thus ‘restor[ing] local subjectivities, values and memories as well as analysing the wider global social processes in which violence is embedded’ (Wilson 1997:157). In an anthropological dissemination of narratives of human rights, we can play our part in effecting a global society of individuals free to believe in and practise a diversity of identities which they ongoingly create.

See also: Individualism, Individuality, Literariness, Movement

HUMANISM

‘Humanism’ is a nineteenth-century term for the values, practices and ideals which are associated with the European Renaissance of the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries, and its rediscovery of the texts of Classical Greece and Rome. The Renaissance appreciation of the latter, the so-called ‘studia humanitatis’, as represented by the work of such diverse figures as Dante, Petrarch, da Vinci and Galileo, Erasmus, Montaigne, Bacon, Shakespeare and Milton, Cervantes and Copernicus, brought about a break with predominant medieval (Christian) perspectives on the nature of life. New emphases arose, a new image of humankind and its capacities. In particular, there was new faith in the power of learning and a desire freely to enlarge its bounds; a scepticism concerning the absoluteness of existing knowledge; a belief in the potentialities for creativity, growth, pleasure and action of the individual human being; and an interest in ascertaining the place of humankind in nature, of discovering the laws of nature, so that life on earth might be placed more within human control.

In succeeding centuries, the humanism of the Renaissance gave on to the Enlightenment and the rise of science, with its belief in rationality, as opposed to (religious) revelation, as an adequate source of human knowledge; also on to liberalism, and a belief in the inherent dignity of

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individuals and their right to freedom and self-determination; and also on to social science, and its belief in the possibility and necessity of applying knowledge about human affairs and individual relations to an improvement of the socio-cultural conditions of human life.

Anthropology and humanism

On this view, anthropology is a humanistic pursuit, with a heritage of rationality, liberalism and advocacy which many would see as legitimately continuing today (cf. Gellner 1993; also Berger 1963). For others, however, the case is more complex, and the relationship between anthropology and humanism is one which might be subjected to a more or less radical critique. Certainly, the humanistic tag is one that can be associated more with some names in anthropology (Paul Radin, Edward Sapir, Ruth Benedict, Robert Redfield, Raymond Firth, Edmund Leach, Victor Turner, Anthony Wallace, James Fernandez, Miles Richardson, Paul Friedrich, David Riches, Michael Jackson) than others, while some have positively decried it, linking it, historico-culturally to Western acts of imperialism (over nature and otherness).

When Eric Wolf (1974) writes that anthropology, as a discipline, is to be understood as: ‘the most scientific of the humanities and the most humanistic of the sciences’, it is clearly a more particular connotation of ‘humanism’ that he is dealing with. In fact, it is difficult to say what precisely the word ‘humanism’ denotes, and what conjoins its various expositions (the work of Erasmus and that of Milton, say, or that of Sapir and of Leach); even what it and they oppose (‘supernaturalism’, ‘theology’, ‘fundamentalism’, ‘totalitarianism’) has no singular essence. As Leach advised in another context (concerning the definition of the term ‘marriage’) it is best to treat humanism as a bundle of traits, a ‘polythetic category’ of concerns (Needham 1975), which are linked together by overlapping commonalities but have no one thing in common. Humanistic anthropology, then (cf. Fratto 1976; Wilk 1991; Brady and Turner 1994), would be expected to exhibit a range of characteristics (as follows), but not to show agreement, among its various exponents, concerning which characteristics properly belong nor how those that do ought to be prioritized.

Traits of humanism

1Human beings are to be regarded as centres and subjects of experience; human beings have experiences, and treating these is a central concern.

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2Human experiences are important because of what they give onto—knowledge—and what they intrinsically demonstrate: a capacity for knowledge, beauty, pleasure, love, reason, emotion and self-awareness. Through their experiences, human subjects are sources of knowledge, and of knowledge about knowing.

3There is, however, something mysterious in this knowledge and selfknowledge; human consciousness, the awareness of having experiences and of acting upon these, is a capacity and quality which makes human beings and their products (historical events, economic systems and literary works) unamenable, for the time being, to the kind of reductive, generalizing and objectifying analysis of certain brands of scientific materialism. The workings of human cognition and perception are at least qualitatively, if not ontologically, different from the material determinations which give rise to cause and effect in the physical world.

4This gives human life and action a value above all else: an importance and a dignity. It also makes human accomplishment, power, status and welfare a cause for celebration, while the finality of death is cause for the greatest sadness. For it would seem the end of consciousness beyond which there is nothing.

5Together with a belief in the human capacity to know, and an expectation that knowledge can be reasonably applied to the solving of problems, there is a scepticism felt for knowledge which claims authority on the basis of tradition alone, as dogma or institutional truth. For knowledge to be authoritative it must be subjected to proof in the light of current experience. Moreover, as experiences change, so knowledge can be expected to too. Human consciousness is dynamic and there is an inexorable evolution, becoming and change to the world which human beings inhabit.

6This is not to say that humanity cannot or will not accede to knowledge of certain eternal verities, rather that what is known to be true must always be treated sceptically and subjected to testing and critique. Continuous scholarship is the route to knowledge, as opposed to all manner of blind belief, doctrine or revelation. For human beings are responsible for discerning and defining the meaning of their lives on earth, through the critical exercise of their innate capacities to know, and so far as has been proven to date they are alone in this exercise; there is no superhuman guiding presence, and human capacities end at their bodily death.

7This places great emphasis on the human body, its potentiality, its fragility, its individuality and its mortality.What human beings know, they know as mortal individuals, secured in discrete, if permeable,

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sensory mechanisms (bodies and minds) which give rise to unique sensoria, unique awareness of the world around them. Individual bodies and minds are at once part of this world and the vehicles for distinct perspectives upon it (the mystery, again, of self-knowledge).

8Faith in the human condition, optimism concerning human potential and a celebration of human achievement, is thus tempered

with a recognition of the absurdity of the human position. So far as is currently known, humans are alone as a consciousness in a universe which has its laws but is otherwise meaningless and entropic beyond the range of the products with which human beings occupy themselves. In human terms the universe appears cruel, but this is simply a matter of perspective, and outwith human perspective nothing is certain. Moreover, what is human perspective but individual perspective? Nothing is known for certain outwith the bodily sensorium of human beings as individual entities.

9Are not ‘heroic’ individuals who live with certain knowledge of the absurdity of life and of the inevitability of death, and yet work towards creating for themselves and others full and meaningful lives, deserving of respect? These lives of knowledge and accomplishment are examples for all; as potential sources of new knowledge and of beauty, indeed, they may offer tangible and direct help to others.

10Hence the importance of individual liberty, freedom of thought and expression, by which individuals can be expected to make the best of their potential to know and create, and the importance of overcoming those circumstances by which individual creativity is threatened. In other words, the bodily individuality of human experience and knowledge gives onto a certain morality: a set of ethical values concerning the rights to free thinking and investigation, to freedom from constriction or oppression, and concerning the benefits to all which accrue therefrom.

11Respect for human dignity and individual freedom and creativity also extends to the ways in which humankind is to be represented. Inasmuch as human beings gain self-knowledge, can gain vantage on their lives and reflect on what they know and do, they are able to express this self-knowledge in language and artefact and hope to communicate it to others; human beings continually compose narratives of their own lived-in worlds. Moreover, human beings also compose narratives of others’ worlds, and, recognizing that much (if not most) true knowledge of others remains inexorably hidden and unsaid within individual selves, these narratives (whether scientific, social-scientific or literary) ought to be of a certain character. Human beings should be seen to be in conscious

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control of their lives, creating the meanings and regularities by which they live and not subject to unconscious or determining forces, to independent causes and constraints. They should be described as possessing agency with regard to natural, social, cultural or historical phenomena. Above all, representational justice should be done to the complexities of human life: to its individuality and commonality, its idiosyncrasy, ambiguity and nuance as much as its conventionalism, its pleasures and glories as well as its cruelties and ignorances.

Anthropos versus ethnos

‘Doing representational justice to the complexities of human life’, the samenesses and the differences, introduces a problem for the humanistic anthropologist regarding the status of culture. Are human beings the same inasmuch as they all inhabit different cultural worlds or over and against their inhabiting such worlds? Do they become human within culture or does their humanity (consciousness, creativity, individuality, dignity) transcend cultural particularities? Geertz has called this anthropology’s ‘recurrent dilemma’ (1973:22): how to square generic human rationality and the biological unity of mankind with the great natural variation of cultural forms. George Stocking concludes that the entire ‘history of anthropology may…be viewed as a continuing (and complex) dialectic between the universalism of “anthropos” and the diversitarianism of “ethnos”’ (1992:347). Anthropological humanists, in other words, have been both cultural relativists and existentialists, some describing human consciousness as essentially individual and free, others describing it as culturally determined.

Cultural relativism can be taken much further, however, and become a thoroughgoing anti-humanistic critique, as has recently transpired under the monikers of ‘structuralism’ and ‘post-structuralism’. If consciousness, its form and content, are not prior to the symbolic discourses and social practices in which it is culturally embedded, then not only is identity—human, individual, whatever—subordinate to cultural matrices (which may remain unconscious), but the whole idea of humankind, humanism, human dignity, and so on, is a historically contingent cultural product: ethnocentric, mythical, teleological. ‘Man’, as Foucault put it, ‘is only a recent invention, a figure not yet two centuries old’ (1972:115).

Whatever one makes of Foucault’s history, the implication is clear: humankind and humanism are concepts to deconstruct and overcome.

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Far from being transcendent, humanistic values, methods, truths are part of specific discourses which have created the world in a certain image so as to serve certain interests and ends. ‘Humankind’—‘the subject’ or, better, ‘the subject-effect’—is ever, inevitably and inextricably enculturated: hence multiply and partially constructed, conditioned, elicited, motivated and gendered. Even the existential certainties of the Western humanist—whereby, in Lewis’s words (1982:55), ‘My distinctness, my being me, is quite unmistakeable to me, there can be nothing of which I am more certain’—amounts to a culturally derived (and rather unusual) ‘metaphysics of presence’.

Tactical humanism

There are a number of possible responses to this critique. One is simply to reassert an existentialist and rationalist position and say that cultural relativism and deconstruction are just plain wrong. Science, medicine, history, literature and travel prove the existence of a universal humanity, and the inherent individuality of consciousness and experience through which it is embodied (cf. Rapport 1994a, 1997a). Of course, this proof cannot force itself on those who would see otherwise—hence, the number of times the word ‘belief appears in the above exposition of (agnostic) humanistic traits. Nevertheless, it is believed that humanistic beliefs are subjected to the most critical attention and are accessible to all who approach with an open mind (cf. Popper 1966).

Another response, as adumbrated philosophically by Rorty (1992), is to admit to the historico-cultural specificity of the humanist perspective but to claim, nonetheless, that as a way of knowing the world it offers the best prospectus for a diversity of cultural world-views being able to live peaceably alongside and through one another.

In what she calls a ‘tactical humanism’ (1990b:138), Lila Abu-Lughod would seem to arrive anthropologically at a similar position. Humanism, she begins, may be a local discourse (despite its erstwhile claims) but it still has more speakers, writers and readers than any other: it carries most moral force as a language of equality. Of course, the discourse has suffered from being misapplied and abused. In the past, celebrating the example of heroic individuals has co-occurred with an eschewing of others’ systematic oppression; positing individuals’ autonomy has cooccurred with a masking of the inequalities of power; placing humankind at the centre of the world has co-occurred with a justifying of an exploitation of nature; and respecting a universality of human dignity and individual integrity has co-occurred with a denying of humanity to specified ‘others’ (women, children, natives, slaves, Jews).

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