Human rights

Anthropology and Human Rights
Do Anthropologists Have an Ethical Obligation to Promote Human Rights?

“[C]ompeting and divergent perspectives on anthropology and human rights make this one of the areas of anthropology that is ripe for renewed attention, especially in light of the underlying stakes involved,” wrote Mark Goodale, assistant professor of conflict analysis and anthropology at George Mason University, in his introduction to the AN series on Anthropology and Human Rights he guest edits. In this AN series spanning from April until October 2006, people from a range of different backgrounds and perspectives respond to one of four questions: Do anthropologists have anything useful or relevant to say about human rights? (April) Should anthropologists try and answer whether human rights are universal? (May) Is the spread of human rights discourse since the end of the Cold War a form of moral imperialism? (Sept) And, do anthropologists have an ethical obligation to promote human rights? (Oct)

The Special Relationship Between Anthropology and Human Rights

Anthropologists Are Obligated to Promote Human Rights and Social Justice

Advocacy Is a Moral Choice of “Doing Some Good”

Anthropology Should Actively Promote Human Rights

An Obligation to "Support Human Rights" Unconditionally Is Misguided Moralism

Anthropology Between Reason and Intuition

The Special Relationship Between Anthropology and Human Rights

Terry Turner
Cornell U

Terry Turner

“Do anthropologists have an ethical obligation to promote human rights?” The question implies that there may be a special relationship between anthropologists and human rights. Such a relationship would in turn imply a conception of human rights framed in terms of specifically anthropological principles or ideas. The AAA, in its Declaration on Anthropology and Human Rights, adopted by a vote of the membership in 1999, restated a broad working definition of human rights first drafted and adopted by the AAA Commission for Human Rights in 1993:

Anthropology as an academic discipline studies the bases and the forms of human diversity and human unity; anthropology as a practice seeks to apply this knowledge to the solution of human problems. As a professional organization of anthropologists, the AAA has long been, and should continue to be, concerned whenever human difference is made the basis for a denial of rights—where “human” is understood in its full range of cultural, social, linguistic and biological senses. Anthropology Newsletter 34(3): 1,5; March 1993 [italics mine TT]

On “Human Difference”
In the terms of the document, “human difference” is a criterion of human rights because it comprises the concrete specificity of what humans, individually and collectively, have made of themselves, evolutionarily, socially and culturally. As used in the text, “difference” refers to specific cultural, social, linguistic or biological features, which are contrasted, as variable and contingent products, to the universal human capacities that enabled their production: in familiar anthropological terms, the human capacities for culture, evolutionary adaptation and social change. “Difference,” as a principle of human rights, denotes the concrete products of the realization of these generic powers: specific cultural forms, social relations, physical bodies and personal identities.

While difference is explicitly cited in the statement only as an invalid basis for denying rights, rather than a positive principle of right in itself, the implication is that the right to difference may constitute a positive, trans-cultural ground for specific human rights. “Difference” thus figures in the statement as a general anthropological basis of “rights.” Rights are more specific claims against the potential or actual denial or abuse of individual or group relations, properties or identities.

This set of propositions, I believe, is consistent with the understanding of human nature at which anthropology as a scientific project has arrived, and corresponds to the consensus of the great majority of anthropologists. It is not in itself a set of ethical norms, but it does have ethical implications. In asserting that people become fully human through the process of transforming their potential capacities for culture, social relations and biological adaptation into specific (different) forms, and that all people possess such capacities (though not necessarily in equal degrees), this scientific consensus constitutes a definition of what humanity is that also implies a principle of what that ought to be: namely, a species whose individual members are able to develop and realize their capacities for the creation of cultural, social, linguistic and physical forms to the limits of their potential, so long as it does not prevent others from doing the same.

On Moral and Intellectual Responsibility
When cultural, social or political systems or situations seek to prevent, devalue or inhibit some or all of their individual members or constituent groups from doing this, for example by stigmatizing the differences between their cultural forms, social practices, personal identities or bodily forms and those of the hegemonic group, this anthropological imperative is implicated as the basis for a claim of violation of human rights by the disadvantaged group.

In such situations, I would argue that anthropology as a collective project and individual anthropologists as participants in it are implicitly concerned by virtue of the fundamental principles of their professional project and calling. This concern implicitly confers a responsibility to speak and/or act against the abuses of the human right in question, although violations of human rights are so many, and so deeply entrenched in all social and political systems, that it is realistically a responsibility that can only be very selectively exercised. There are of course many human rights issues that lack the specifically anthropological aspect of stigmatized human difference I have sought to identify, with which anthropologists will be concerned simply as ordinary citizens or moral persons.

The specifically anthropological concern with certain human rights issues I have suggested, together with the implied responsibilities it entails, is not primarily ethical in character, although it clearly figures as a principle of professional ethics. Rather, it is more broadly a matter of moral and intellectual principle, and includes a sense of reciprocal obligation to and solidarity with those other human beings of different culture, social practices and physical traits whose differences anthropologists have made the subjects of their scientific careers. It is of course these very differences that have so often been made the pretexts for prejudicial treatment and violations of human rights.

Helping to combat abuses of the human rights of our research subjects becomes, in this wider perspective, not merely a narrow matter of ethical obligations but a question of the courage of our theoretical convictions and our sense of the reciprocal obligations developed in fieldwork, and ultimately of commitment to the anthropological idea of humanity as an open-ended process of realization of capacities common to all, which makes it ultimately as much a political as an ethical question.

Terence Turner is professor emeritus of anthropology at the University of Chicago, and professor (retired) at Cornell University. He has worked with the Kayapo and other Amazonian indigenous societies since 1962, and has taught and written on many aspects of anthropological theory, South American ethnography and ethnohistory.

Anthropologists Are Obligated to Promote Human Rights and Social Justice

Laura R Graham
U Iowa

Laura R Graham

Anthropologists who research and study people suffering human rights abuses and forms of social injustice have an ethical obligation to seek ways to improve these conditions. And as a humanistic field, the discipline of anthropology has an obligation to promote social justice.

Unlike anthropologists who re-search subjects of equal or higher prestige or socioeconomic status, anthropologists who work with vulnerable indigenous and other marginal communities have a special responsibility to engage in support of these groups, or advocate on their behalf.

Scholarship and Advocacy
Members of communities whom anthropologists study facilitate access to the culturally specific knowledge and understanding anthropologists seek. Anthropologists transform this information into scholarly and professional dissertations, articles, books, encyclopaedia articles and films, and use these products to advance their individual professional careers. While these scholarly products may, and sometimes do, effect positive change, anthropologists should not fool themselves into thinking their scholarship in itself has the potential to bring about significant social benefits for communities they write about.

Sharing the skills, knowledge and information we possess, or have the ability to access, with communities we study is one of, if not the most important way that anthropologists can compensate those we rely upon for professional advancement. Indeed, among anthropologists’ most useful skills is our ability to broker information and knowledge. This and our ability to publicly and broadly disseminate information are tremendous resources that the communities and people we research who suffer injustices can use for social empowerment.

Local Support and Broad Advocacy
Ethnographers routinely engage in local support activities. These efforts range from helping individuals open bank accounts, translating, providing medication or literacy education, to helping with grant proposals or procuring legal advice on matters such as rights to, or defense of, indigenous land. While many anthropologists may not conceive of some of these as “activist” or “advocative,” no matter how small or seemingly “apolitical” these sorts of activities may appear to an outsider, within the local community they are inherently acts of advocacy. They promote, if even in very small ways, subordinate peoples’ efforts to attain better service (such as healthcare), to achieve greater independence (as in banking) or rights (land claims, for instance).

The degree to which anthropologists become overtly involved in advocacy or “activism” is something that varies according to local needs, the researcher’s disposition and other situational factors. Overt advocacy or “activism” involves working to advance the interests of a group or community within a broader social arena than that of the local context; for instance, in national, regional or international policy, through the institutional support of NGOs, or through linkages that extend outside the immediate locale.

As anthropologists we are well aware that social justice and human rights are cultural constructions that are constantly subject to redefinition. Our training makes us uniquely sensitive to this issue and to complicated questions regarding culturally appropriate ways in which these may be specifically defined, including in state and international policymaking.

Anthropologists Aren’t Neutral
Each anthropologist must carefully consider how her or his skills will be most suitable to advancing social justice among the research community at any given moment. An anthropologist who has a PhD degree may be a more effective advocate in certain situations than one who is doing doctoral fieldwork, for example. Or someone may be a more useful advocate after having left the field.

Anthropologists’ participation in efforts to improve conditions for or within communities they research does not contaminate anthropological knowledge or the ethnographic endeavour as some have argued, most recently in debates surrounding the Darkness in El Dororado controversy. Such activities do not necessarily compromise an investigator’s ability to conduct sound research.

Whether anthropologists like it or not, conducting anthropological research is a political and privileged endeavour. As many have pointed out, the less privileged communities that anthropologists study inevitably apprehend anthropologists—be they explicitly activist or not—within networks of power. Since neutrality and observational objectivity do not exist, anthropologists must thus embrace and come to terms with the political nature of our work.

Openly Discuss Advocacy
Instead of attempting to construct the appearance of neutrality, anthropologists should openly discuss ways their support and advocacy activities unfold and especially how these affect emergent ethnographic encounters and knowledge. Work that promotes human rights and social justice, in whatever small or explicitly activist ways, like other features of the ethnographic encounter, influences our and future anthropologists’ access to information and ways that ethnographers understand individuals, social relationships and communities.

Since support and advocacy are integral to anthropological research with vulnerable populations, it is imperative that anthropologists consider their advocacy as a legitimate component of their scholarly work. Moreover, advocacy and activism should be subject to discussion and reflection within anthropological scholarship. Recent “engaged anthropology” is a positive turn. It invites anthropologists to frankly discuss, consider and reflect upon in their scholarly writing the advocacy and activism that we do. This honesty renders the conditions of research more transparent and ultimately strengthens the quality of anthropological documentation and knowledge generally.

When anthropologists carry out research among vulnerable individuals, we insert ourselves into webs of social relations in which we are also social actors. Our privileged position, specialized training, unique skills (and sometimes relatively large grant budgets) carry with them specific ethical obligations that compel us to promote the well-being of the people who, after all, are collaborators in our anthropological research and in the production of anthropological knowledge.

Laura R Graham is associate professor of anthropology at University of Iowa and a member of the AAA Committee for Human Rights. She has carried out ethnographic and advocacy work on behalf of Xavante and other indigenous communities in Brazil and most recently in Venezuela.

Advocacy Is a Moral Choice of “Doing Some Good”

Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban
Rhode Island C

Carolyln Fluehr-Lobban

In 1996, as a member of the commission that drafted the present AAA Code of Ethics, I collaborated in crafting the language that “anthropologists may choose to move beyond disseminating research results to a position of advocacy. This is an individual decision, but not an ethical responsibility” (CoE, III.C.2).

Although the world of politics and research has changed in some fundamental ways, I continue to hold this view. However, today I would add that while advocacy may not be a professional ethical responsibility, it is a moral responsibility that anthropologists can choose to exercise if they are so moved. Recalling that the Code of Ethics is an educational and not a legislative document, advocacy as a moral responsibility can only be suggested as a course of action appropriate to anthropological practice. Advocacy as a professional choice is necessarily limited to issues arising from anthropological research, not from those that bear upon the lives of anthropologists as citizens, as religious practitioners, or any other non-professional role they may fill.

Choices for Professional Advocacy
For example, anthropologists with expertise on American Indian culture may choose to advocate in favor of a casino in a state that has historically opposed Indian gaming. The same anthropologist may be asked—by the Indian tribe, or by the state—to give objective expert testimony about Indian lands and tribal sovereignty. In that role the anthropologist would offer professional expert testimony, but not necessarily be acting as an advocate. However, if the same anthropologist is hired by the state or by the tribe, or chooses to offer his or her service without compensation to produce statements or testimony in their favor, that testimony intended to benefit one or the other side would be an example of advocacy.

My own experience as an expert witness in political asylum cases is a choice I make that I view as advocacy. However, I do not see this as an ethical responsibility for anthropologists, nor would I criticize a colleague who averred this role. However, I understand that it is my credentials as a professional anthropologist with expertise in Africa and the Middle East that are often convincing factors that favor positive outcomes. My professional credentials are why my testimony is sought, yet I do not see this as a professional responsibility, and anecdotal information suggests that few scholars do, in fact, offer their expertise in this way.

Giving expert testimony is not always an unmitigated good. Anthropologists and other experts can only testify on the basis of the asylum seeker’s claims that harm will result if the seeker is returned to the country of origin. Cases with credible affidavits of suffering or loss in the country of origin are easy to accept, however some testimonies belie credibility. Expert witnesses can be compensated, making financial gain an added incentive to that of advocacy.

The Notion of Harm
Some anthropologists are strong believers and advocates for a variety of human rights initiatives. Others, myself included, have argued that universal human rights trump traditional ideas about cultural relativism, and they advocate for social change away from harmful cultural practices, such as domestic violence, or female circumcision, in my own case.

I argued that it is the notion of harm to individuals or groups that is critical in making moral choices between universal rights and cultural relativism. “When reasonable persons from different cultural backgrounds agree that certain institutions or cultural practices cause harm, I wrote in a 1998 AnthroNotes article, “then the moral neutrality of cultural relativism must be suspended.” Diverging from traditional cultural relativism the anthropologist advocates for the amelioration or withdrawal of the harmful practice.

Complex Choices and Actors
Advocacy is, of course, highly contextual and personal. Moreover, human rights advocacy is complex. International human rights movements have broad, highly differentiated moral and political agendas. Many anthropologists would find themselves in broad agreement with advocacy groups, such as Amnesty International (AI) or Human Rights Watch. They have gained both high international credibility and legitimacy, and are often seen as needed supra-state watchdog groups for violators of human rights that do not respond to pressure from individual states that are criticized. Thus, AI universally criticizes the state application of the death penalty, whether in the US, South Africa or China. Religiously based human rights groups, such as “Save the Children,” have a religious as well as humanitarian agenda.

The UN Commission on Human Rights has broad, although not universal political legitimacy, for its positions, such as recent stands on the humanitarian crisis in Darfur. However, political and human rights groups were not unanimous in their use of the term “genocide” to describe the conflict in Darfur, and the politics of genocide made the human rights response more complicated as a result leaving advocates with a complex set of choices.

Ethical discourse to “do no harm” predominates in medicine, and in the physical and social sciences, including anthropology. This core principle lies at the heart of professional ethical responsibility. Rather than “doing no harm,” advocacy may be described as a moral choice of “doing some good,” a choice that anthropologists may increasingly adopt as they engage more proactively with those whom they study.

Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban is the author of “Cultural Relativism and Universal Human Rights,” AnthroNotes, 20 (2), 1998, and a member of the AAA Committee on Ethics and AAA Ad Hoc Commission on the Engagement of Anthropology with the US Security & Intelligence Communities.

Anthropology Should Actively Promote Human Rights

Ida Nicolaisen
Copenhagen U

Ida Nicolaisen

“Do anthropologists have an ethical obligation to promote human rights?” Could this be questioned?! My spontaneous reaction on the day I sat down to think about this question was one of surprise.

I had just dealt with my email and been alerted, once again, by the Cordillera Peoples Alliance on the killing of another indigenous spokesperson. In this case the killers had attempted to murder Chandu Claver, chairperson of the Bayan Muna-Kalinga of Luzon and a staunch advocate of human rights, peace and justice. The killers had ambushed and wounded Claver and his seven-year-old daughter and killed his wife Alice Omengan Claver, an active member of the Cordillera Students’ Organization.

The murder added another victim to the long list of unabated, politically motivated assassinations of leaders of indigenous peoples’ organizations and members of their families in the Philippines. No less than 73 indigenous persons have been subjected to extra-judicial killings in the country since 2005. Up to now not a single perpetrator has been identified and brought to justice.

Indigenous Peoples’ Rights
Ethics loom prominently on political agendas these days. Defence of human rights is invoked to justify military interventions and war in some parts of the world, while grave violations of basic human rights are being committed in others without international attention and interference. The latter is often the case of the appalling human rights violations committed against indigenous peoples. About 340 million people identify themselves as indigenous today, and many indigenous societies experience serious threats against their leaders and grave violations of their basic human rights.

Rodolfo Stavenhagen, our colleague and Geneva-based UN Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedom of Indigenous People, is flooded with serious cases. So is the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, which held its fifth session in New York in May 2006, incidentally the second largest conference in UN history, with the participation of member states, UN agencies and more than 1,200 indigenous leaders. Indigenous peoples share this grim fate with other marginalized groups, the very ones among whom anthropologists carry out their studies.

Institutional Responsibility
We have debated the issue whether anthropologists have an ethical obligation to promote human rights at length in academic fora ever since WWII, most lately in this one. Human rights pose difficult and intriguing intellectual questions. They entail complicated ethical and political perspectives. There is an obvious need for in-depth analyses of this field to achieve a deeper understanding of these complicated issues. I do not question that. Individual anthropologists may choose to engage only in these debates and distance themselves from an active promotion of human rights. Academic institutions and organizations should not, in my view. They must defend human rights and combat social injustice.

No university, scholarly institution or academy of the Western world is without ethical guidelines of research for its various disciplines. This is also the case for anthropology. In my opinion, however, there is more to the issue of professional ethics than our written codes of conduct. We owe it to indigenous peoples and other marginalized groups to stand up for their basic human rights when needed.

Anthropology has fed intellectually on indigenous communities and other small-scale societies around the world from its formative years until today. Historically these societies launched our profession. They provided us with data for theoretical endeavours and hence acceptance as an academic discipline. It is due to the generosity, hospitality and endless patience of our indigenous informants that we have been able achieve understanding of their ways of life and cultures.

Reciprocity to Our Hosts
We have achieved academic recognition as individuals and “branded” our discipline with their help, and we continue to do so. Of course, anthropology has broadened its scope considerably over the past 40 years. Still, at the core of the discipline there is a fascination with the sociocultural and environmental “experiments” in human interaction and survival of indigenous and other small-scale societies.

In my book it is payback time. It is time that anthropologists stand up much more forcefully to defend the human rights of indigenous and other marginalized societies and groups, and do so in a way that is sensitive to indigenous views. Anthropologists can make a difference individually, but much more effectively as a profession through our academic institutions and universities, workplaces, organizations and scholarly academies.

Anthropology should join forces with other disciplines: medicine, law, and media and communication studies to strengthen its voice in the combat against human-rights violations. We have the insights, but we must lobby to better the situation, and do so at the request of and in collaboration with the peoples whose rights are being violated. It would be shameful if anthropology keeps buzzing on the academic Parnassus, while the very people who have so enriched our personal lives and academic discipline are being deprived of their basic human rights.

Ida Nicolaisen is senior researcher, Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, Copenhagen University, and a member of the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues.

An Obligation to "Support Human Rights" Unconditionally Is Misguided Moralism

Jane K Cowan
U Sussex

Jane K Cowan

In both mischief and seriousness, somewhat against my own instincts but to provoke debate, my answer to the question whether anthropologists have an ethical obligation to promote human rights is “no.” I am not advocating disengagement from human rights politics in pursuit of an objective, apolitical description, nor am I encouraging indifference to injustice, suffering and inequality.

To the contrary: my concern is with the ways a hegemonic human rights model crowds out alternative ethical visions, such as those based on need, well-being, care or responsibility, that may more effectively help us diagnose, comprehend and work towards ameliorating specific social wrongs. Rather than taking it as an unquestioned virtue, anthropologists need to keep open the question whether “supporting human rights” is always an ethically adequate or even pragmatically effective response.

Human Rights as Complex
Empirical studies of rights processes are revealing the wide appeal of human rights discourse, its multiple reinterpretations and the myriad goals to which it is directed. Rights are not emancipatory in themselves; everything depends on who uses them, how, for which purposes, for and against whom, in which contexts. Rights are simultaneously enabling and constraining; moreover, their pursuit and implementation frequently entails unforeseen and unintended consequences. Given the ambiguous character of rights processes, as well as the indeterminacy of outcomes, an obligation to “support human rights” unconditionally is misguided moralism.

Human rights have been subjected to vigorous and varied criticism, even from those passionately committed to them. Let me elaborate just three points I find especially compelling.

First, in addressing disadvantage, the human rights model focuses too narrowly on the state as primary duty-bearer. It encourages claimants to demand recognition and resources from the state without acknowledging, given always-limited state resources, that choices must constantly be made over whose rights and which rights are privileged over others, and that this prioritization requires serious public debate on rights and needs within the larger collectivity.

Focusing energies on legal formalization of rights and the state’s obligations also diverts attention from other domains, like the economy, that may influence people’s lives equally profoundly.
Rights are notoriously poor instruments for challenging invidious practices and power arrangements in the private sphere, whether in families or the workplaces of multinational corporations.

Shift to Human Responsibility
A legacy of their origin as protection of the individual from the state, human rights construe harm through a tripartite structure of victim (passive, innocent), violator (active, deviant) and witness/advocate (active, heroic). Aimed at galvanizing public opinion, human rights representations elide facts and silence experiences which do not support this model. Yet few conflicts are so morally unambiguous.

Where both sides in a conflict perceive themselves as righteous and beleaguered, the human rights model rings false. Its strident moral absolutism may enrage and alienate those labelled, rightly or wrongly, as violators, who see their own legitimate concerns denied or misunderstood. It can prove counter-productive to long-term efforts to rebuild societies on a basis of peace and justice, in as much as these require less self-righteous modes of relating that are also more attuned to moral complexity: listening, compromise and the creation of new solidarities and practices of co-existence based on recognition of an imperfect, shared humanness.

Finally, an “ethical obligation to support human rights” demands too little from “us” in the position of witness/advocate/concerned citizen. It encourages moral laziness, guiding us toward an undemanding morality tale where victim and violator are clearly distinguished and where others are to blame. It absolves us from examining structural aspects of injustice and suffering and how we are implicated, through our practices of consuming, our political choices, the governments we elect. It diverts us from a more difficult but more creative politics which would examine global and local power relations and privilege, seek redistribution of power, authority and resources, and forge new alliances.

Rather than an obligation to support human rights, I would advocate a shift toward human responsibility. In this historical moment of ecological crisis, we need an ethical discourse that propels us toward our obligations to each other, to our children and to all of planetary life. Rights discourse is premised on the sovereign individual as passive, entitled recipient. Cultivating a more inclusive ethical imagination and an attitude of responsible agency beyond the self is now urgent.

Jane K Cowan is an anthropologist and ethnomusicologist with interests in Europe and the Balkans, especially Greece. She is the author of Dance and the Body Politic in Northern Greece and has published numerous articles on gender and power, local identities, popular music and ritual performance in contemporary Greece.

Anthropology Between Reason and Intuition

Mark Goodale
George Mason U

Mark Goodale

With these five answers to its fourth, and final, question, the series “Anthropology and Human Rights—An Open Exchange” comes to a close. In many ways, in its multiplicity, substantiveness and engagement with contemporary issues, the exchange went well beyond even our most optimistic expectations. For this I would like to offer my warmest thanks to both the series contributors and the editor of AN, Stacy Lathrop, who managed the project and has otherwise made AN into a venue where an exchange of this kind can take place.

Pleas and Provocations
I hesitate, as the series guest editor, to try and offer a set of systematic conclusions, to draw out implications, or to locate the exchange, taken as a whole, in relation to wider current debates over the relationship between anthropology and human rights. Certainly readers will draw their own conclusions about what were intended as short and provocative essays on specific and admittedly idiosyncratically chosen topics.

I encouraged the contributors to frame their responses beyond the conventions of traditional academic exchange, which nevertheless continue to be necessary as anthropologists try and ply their trade within wider and less forgiving epistemological waters, but which also often lead to knowledge production through a kind of intertextual bickering, what a mentor (and one of the series contributors) always describes as the “he said, she said” approach to scholarship.

What the contributors offered instead has been a collection of open and unencumbered anthropological reflections on different aspects of one of the most significant developments of the last 20 years: the rise of viable international and transnational human rights regimes and their impact on the practice of social, economic and political life, from the truth and reconciliation commissions that have come to dominate the international management of so-called post-conflict zones, to the explosion in “local” appropriations of transnational human rights discourse as part of broader struggles over cultural identity, the control of resources, biogenetic integrity, and other sites of contestation, both new and old.

It would do a kind of violence, in other words, to hover over this collection of ideas, provocations, insights, and passionate pleas, and attempt to impose conceptual order on it, or to try and bend it to my own intellectual purposes. In the event, as would be expected across such a range of views, I can find as many places of convergence with my own emerging position on the relationship between anthropology and human rights as I can points of radical divergence.

The wide spaces between perspectives on anthropology and human rights point toward the continuing problem of what Gerald Hyman, in his April essay, described as anthropology’s “ambivalence” toward human rights, at the same time they reflect the tremendous potential of what I have called, in a similar “In Focus” in the March 2006 AA, an “ecumenical anthropology of human rights.” So in keeping with the open, fragmented and essentially indeterminate spirit of this exchange, I add what amount to reflections on reflections—certainly nothing that adds up to anything as dignified as a formal argument.

Reflections On Reflections
The exchange began with an open-ended question that was intended to take the measure of current understandings of anthropology’s relationship to human rights. The implication was that these understandings have changed dramatically since the early 1990s, when the AAA recast itself for certain purposes as a transnational human rights NGO, a move that began with the creation of what later became the permanent Committee for Human Rights and culminated in the 1999 adoption by the general membership of the “Declaration on Anthropology and Human Rights,” a strong statement of principle that had the effect—among other things—of definitively repudiating the AAA’s 1947 “Statement on Human Rights.”

The wording of the question was intentionally ambiguous; the contributors were asked to consider the relationship through the twin lenses of relevance and usefulness. Victoria Sanford, whose own research and activism have taken her into the deepest and most tragic corners of Guatemala’s killing fields, issued a full-throated plea for anthropologists to look beyond the siren song of critical academic discourse and do everything possible to improve the conditions that are so “tangible and immediate to the lives of those who live in the communities where we work.”

Veena Das, by contrast, urged us to consider the “conditions of possibility” that would enable a more robust anthropological participation in what she describes as “emancipatory projects” (including those structured by human rights discourse). While she can see how human rights “can be used to destroy carefully knitted social arrangements in local worlds,” she also knows that human rights discourse is often “translated in practices on the side of justice.” But despite this promise, she is highly skeptical that the institutional conditions can be created that would allow anthropology to formally contribute to these processes of translation.

The second question raised the problem of universality. Anthropologists have traditionally avoided participating in the different debates over the ontological status of human rights. Implicit in this question was both a critique of this absence, and a suggestion that anthropology had something innovative to say about what have been considered problems best left to the philosophy of human rights. The question was not, however, meant to imply that anthropologists have something important to contribute within the philosophy of human rights. Rather, the recent study of human rights practices has actually called into question the status of the philosophy of human rights itself, and what it means to ask and answer basic questions about rights (human or otherwise), such as, Where do they come from? How can they be legitimate? Are they essentially political? And so on.

In a sense, the next question was intended to explore different implications of the same body of research on human rights practices. By invoking the specter of “moral imperialism,” respondents were asked to consider the complex ways in which power radiates through transnational human rights networks. Laura Nader’s essay examined the normative blind spots that emerged as a consequence of the growing power of the international human rights system. These weaknesses were not the result of anything within the idea of human rights itself; as Nader says, it was “definitely a paradigm open to interpretation.” Rather, these deficiencies were the product of the distorting political contexts through which the idea of human rights was introduced in different parts of the world.

Richard Wilson sees something sinister in the question itself. Abstract debates over power and human rights conceal the fact that local actors are the ones who have an urgent “desire to resolve concrete local problems” with the help of human rights discourse. The concreteness and even simplicity behind the globalization of human rights are totally obscured in what becomes for Wilson a kind of promiscuous criticality, which, for good measure, gets evocatively described as a “high-handed Leninist vanguardism.”

Epistemological Humility
The final question of the series assumed that the first three questions and responses would lead to the conclusion that anthropology does, in fact, have something important to contribute to both debates over human rights, and political and social struggles in terms of them. It therefore asked contributors to consider something beyond questions of mere methodology or intellectual history: whether anthropologists had an ethical obligation to promote human rights.

The Danish anthropologist Ida Nicolaisen argues that the discipline must never bite the hand that has fed it, that whether through human rights or otherwise, anthropologists do indeed have an ethical obligation to “stand up for the … basic human rights” of “indigenous peoples and other marginalized groups.” In a sense, Jane Cowan would agree, at least with the basic premise: anthropologists should develop more engaged forms of political and professional practice. But she would sharply disagree about the role of human rights in “long term efforts to rebuild societies on a basis of peace and justice.” Instead, she argues that anthropologists should think beyond the narrow individualism of human rights discourse in order to “[c]ultivat[e] a more inclusive ethical imagination and an attitude of responsible agency beyond the self.”

Yet perhaps the response that best reveals a common thread that binds the many together is Terence Turner’s. This is most fitting, since he has played a crucial role in reorienting at least American anthropology in relation to human rights, in part through his institutional activities within the AAA, but also through his broader research, scholarship and passionate public anthropology. There is a profound humility in his essay, which (at least for me) sheds new light on the sources of anthropology’s historical insecurity within wider human rights debates. His position on the relationship between human rights and human difference is well-known; it is expressed quite clearly, for example, in the 1999 Declaration. But there is something else here. Beyond any conceptual framework that might, at least theoretically, reposition it in relation to human rights, Turner’s essay points to a different level at which anthropology and human rights are inextricably bound.

Anthropology has never been a company discipline, especially compared to those whose sense of epistemological mission and willingness to perform sacrifices to the gods of certainty and enlightened progress have made them darlings of public policy and have landed their musings on the general nonfiction bestseller lists (see Freakonomics, currently #6 at TBR). This is because anthropologists have always been too close to the practices of everyday life to feel comfortable within the modern project that, somewhat ironically, gave birth to their profession.

Like Groucho Marx, most anthropologists have, in the end, refused to join the club that would (with some arm twisting) have them as a member, even as they continue to look on with envy as the masters of the dismal science (among others) walk proudly through the club’s front door. And when this closeness with the practices of everyday life is also closeness with the kind of oppression, violence, and tragedy that defy rational comprehension, then anthropologists have found themselves at a loss to abstract from it.

This is the existential dilemma that comes through so clearly in Turner’s, and, to a certain extent, many of the other essays in this exchange. This is why anthropology did not take its place alongside political philosophy and law among the academic disciplines that laid the intellectual foundations for the postwar human rights system. But this epistemological humility, which for Turner expresses itself as a “matter of moral and intellectual principle,” is more than anything else a recognition that those dark moments in the human experience, moments that are only partially contemplated by human rights, can really only be apprehended—and thus understood—in the phenomenological spaces between reason and intuition.

In the end, anthropologists must surrender to what they cannot conceptualize and find ways to act on what Turner describes as “our sense” of what seems right, of what a (culturally conditioned) conscience whispers in our ears, and of the “anthropological idea of humanity as an open-ended process of realization of capacities common to all.”

Mark Goodale is assistant professor of conflict analysis and anthropology at George Mason University. He is the author of two forthcoming books, The Anthropology of Human Rights: Critical Explorations in Ethical Theory and Social Practice and Dilemmas of Modernity: Bolivian Encounters with Law and Liberalism, and editor (with Sally Engle Merry) of The Practice of Human Rights: Tracking Law Between the Global and the Local, in addition to recent articles on anthropology and human rights in Current Anthropology and American Anthropologist.