Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Mark Goodale is Professor of Cultural and Social Anthropology at the University of Lausanne. He is the author of Dilemmas of Modernity: Bolivian Encounters with Law and Liberalism (Stanford, 2008), editor of Human Rights: An Anthropological Reader (2009), and coeditor of The Practice of Human Rights: Tracking Law Between the Global and the Local (2007).

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Surrendering to Utopia

Stanford University Press

Contents

Acknowledgments..................................................................................xiPrologue: The phenomenology of human rights at 35,000 feet ......................................11 Introduction: A Well-Tempered Human Rights....................................................52 Becoming Irrelevant: The Curious History of Anthropology and Human Rights.....................183 Encountering Relativism: The Philosophy, Politics, and Power of a Dilemma.....................404 Culture on the Half Shell: Universal Rights through the Back Door.............................655 Human Rights along the Grapevine: The Ethnography of Transnational Norms......................916 Rights Unbound: Anthropology and the Emergence of Neoliberal Human Rights.....................111Conclusion: Human Rights in Anthropological Key..................................................128Appendix 1: Statement on Human Rights (1947).....................................................135Appendix 2: Declaration on Anthropology and Human Rights (1999)..................................141Notes............................................................................................143Bibliography.....................................................................................157Index............................................................................................171

Chapter One

A Well-Tempered Human Rights

At the end of his typically penetrating essay on the relationship between human rights and poverty, John Gledhill issues a version of what has become in recent years the standard anthropological expression of theoretical modesty. After a series of interventions that, among other things, reconfigure our understanding of the role of nongovernmental organizations in promoting rights in the developing world, suggest a dialectical framework for explaining the way hegemonic and counterhegemonic forces structure rights practices within emerging transnational and ethical regimes, and, finally, show how Anthony Giddens's apparently progressive vision of modern subjectivity is actually a "regime of truth" that denies agency to precisely those social actors whose lived experiences seem to most demand the protections of some effective framework, Gledhill goes on to explain that "anthropologists are not social and political philosophers, and our role is largely one of observing how ... developments manifest themselves in practice" (2003:225; emphasis added).

Likewise, John Bowen, at the beginning of his study of the intersections of law, religion, and the constitutions of political discourse in Indonesia, explains-after asserting the irrelevance to Indonesia of much leading political and social theory-that is "intention is not to offer a competing version of political theory, a reconstruction of society from first principles. Rather, I offer an anthropological account of such reasoning, the ways in which citizens take account of their own pluralism of values as they carry out their affairs" (2003:12). Yet despite developing a series of arguments that amount to an innovative theory of contemporary political and legal identity-one that makes value-pluralism the foundation for political community-he reminds us that his study should not be confused with an attempt to "formulate a systematic, principled account of how (some) societies ought to organized"; rather, his is merely an "account of the issues, institutions, and stakes for actors in a particular social setting" (267). He then goes on to conclude that his book is also "an anthropological account of the reasonableness of the ways in which citizens can take account of their own pluralism of values in carrying out their affairs-an account which might, in its turn, inform new versions of political theory" (268; emphasis in original).

In other words, his study of normative pluralism and citizenship in Indonesia both highlights the supposedly stark differences between "liberal political theory and comparative social scientific inquiry"-the former quixotically directed toward envisioning social and political life from first principles, the latter modestly and quietly documenting social and political life in all of its comparative diversity-and manages to "inform new versions of political theory" at the same time. Yet Bowen's anthropology of public reasoning does articulate a set of general theoretical principles that explain similar processes in other plural societies. Are we to believe that it is only in Indonesia where the four dominant "general features of public reasoning"-which Bowen insightfully describes as "precedent, principle, pragmatism, and metanormative reasoning"-are to be found? (258).

Gledhill and Bowen are not to be faulted for their theoretical reticence. Since at least the mid-1980s, two trends have emerged within especially British social and American cultural anthropology: the first-which has been on the wane since the early 1990s-reflects an enthusiastic embrace of a series of (mostly) Continental social and critical theoretical influences, in which social theory is not necessarily derived from the application of scientific methods calculated to uncover the cause of things, but rather exists in a much more tenuous, even intentionally problematized, relationship with the practices of everyday life. The other trend, which Gledhill's and Bowen's work evokes, expresses a re-entrenchment, or perhaps rediscovery, of the advantages of anthropology's unique version of science, in which the anthropologist fulfills her purpose only to the extent that she gives as "adequate account of the issues, institutions, and stakes for actors." By "adequate account" what is meant at the very least is accurate observation and documentation; an even better "account" would, like Bowen's does, frame observed events and social interactions in relation to a series of meaningful cultural and historical contexts. Yet an account goes to far, becomes unanthropological, when it generalizes beyond even the richest study of a particular time and place and either aspires to a "regime of truth" (Gledhill) or evolves into a search for "first principles" (Bowen).

But here's the rub: just because many anthropologists have rejected the formal study and formulation of social theory does not mean that it is not being studied and formulated, often, as Bowen rightly argues, in a "skeletonized" way, through systems of ideas that are grounded in an entirely abstracted account of legal, social, and political practices. There is actually nothing logically inconsistent about pursuing social theory in this way, even if the goals is to pass particular systems of ideas about social life through the crucible of lived experience. That is to say, the anthropological critique of liberal political and legal theory on the grounds that it claims to describe "first principles" is not really a critique of the manner through which theorists like Will Kymlicka and Joseph Raz and John Rawls crafted systems that purport to explain the relationship between the subject and social values. What this critique is really pointing to is the fact that this particular constellation of theories was never intended to be embedded in, let alone derived from, the different types of...