Honing a Critical Cultural Study of Human Rights

Abstract

A critical cultural studies of human rights has yet to emerge as an interdisciplinary field of study. Despite the proliferation of scholarly work in legal philosophy and law and humanities over the past decade, we have seen little by way of sustained dialogue between critics of rights or conversations between rights critics and theorists of culture. Nonetheless, the characteristic approaches, concerns, concepts, and methods of cultural studies are both appropriate and necessary in a global policy environment that has put increasing emphasis upon cultural identity and cultural resources in both rights-based practices and neoliberal governmentalities, suggesting new avenues of inquiry.

Keywords:

• Articulation
• Cultural Policy
• Cultural Resources
• Cultural Rights
• Governmentality
• Ideology
• Identity
• International Law
• Rights-based Practices
• Transnationalism
• Neoliberalism

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study for its support for her writing project, and Nicole Aylwin, Lisa Norton, and Andrew Jacob for research and editorial assistance.

Notes

1. Thomas Hylland Eriksen, “Between Universalism and Relativism: A Critique of the UNESCO Concept of Culture,” in Culture and Rights: Anthropological Perspectives, ed. Jane Cowan, Marie-Benedicte Dembour, and Richard Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 127–48.

2. Bruce Robbins and Elsa Stamatopolou, “Reflections on Culture and Cultural Rights,” South Atlantic Quarterly 103 (2004): 419–34.

3. Jane Cowan, Marie-Benedicte Dembour and Richard Wilson, “Introduction,” in Culture and Rights: Anthropological Perspectives, eds. Jane Cowan, Marie-Benedicte Dembour and Richard Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 1–26.

4. Stuart Cunningham, “Cultural Studies from the Viewpoint of Cultural Policy,” in Critical Cultural Policy Studies: A Reader, ed. Justin Lewis and Toby Miller (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 13–22; Stuart Cunningham, “The Creative Industries after Cultural Policy: A Genealogy and Some Possible Preferred Futures,” International Journal of Cultural Studies ¹ (2004): 105–15; John McMurria, “Moby Dick, Cultural Policy and the Geographies and Geopolitics of Cultural Labor,” International Journal of Cultural Studies 12 (2009): 237–56.

5. Justin Lewis and Toby Miller, ed., Critical Cultural Policy Studies (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2003); Toby Miller and George Yudice, Cultural Policy (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2002).

6. Tony Bennett and Colin Mercer, “Improving Research and International Cooperation for Cultural Policy,” in Commentaries: Recasting Cultural Policies, Our Creative Diversity (UNESCO World Commission for Culture and Development, 1998).

7. Kevin Robins, “Transnational Cultural Policy and European Cosmpolitanism,” Cultural Politics 3 (2008): 147–74.

8. Richard Johnson, “What is Cultural Studies Anyway?,” Social Text 16 (1987): 38–80.

9. Arjun Appadurai, “Global Ethnoscapes: Notes and Queries for a Transnational Anthropology,” in Recapturing Anthropology, ed. Richard J. Fox (Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research, 1991), 191–210.

10. Mark Goodale, “Introduction: Human Rights and Anthropology,” in Human Rights: An Anthropological Reader, ed. Mark Goodale (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 1–20.

11. George Yudice, The Expediency of Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003).

12. Vijayendra Rao and Michael Walton, ed., Culture and Public Action (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004).

13. Costas Douzinas, Human Rights and Empire: The Political Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism (Abingdon: Routledge-Cavendish, 2007).

14. Douzinas, 7.

15. Upendra Baxi, The Future of Human Rights (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002).

16. Balakrishnan Rajagopal, International Law From Below (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

17. Balakrishnan Rajagopal, International Law From Below (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 158–9.

18. Balakrishnan Rajagopal, International Law From Below (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 165–6.

19. Balakrishnan Rajagopal, International Law From Below (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 170.

20. See, for example, Gerard Rosenburg, The Hollow Hope: Can Courts Bring about Social Change? (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1991) and Stuart Scheingold, The Politics of Rights (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1974).

21. Baxi.

22. Douzinas, 24.

23. Douzinas, 27.

24. Douzinas, 33.

25. Baxi, 132; also see John Erni, “Human Rights in the Neoliberal Imagination: Mapping the New Sovereignties,” Cultural Studies 23 (2009): 417–36.

26. Baxi, 139.

27. Pheng Cheah, Inhuman Conditions: On Cosmopolitanism and Human Rights (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006).

28. See, for example, Clive Barnett, “Culture, Government and Spatiality: Reassessing the ‘Foucault Effect’ in Cultural Policy,” International Journal of Cultural Studies 2 (1999): 369–97; Clive Barnett et al., “The Elusive Subjects of Neo-Liberalism: Beyond the Analytics of Governmentality,” Cultural Studies 22 (2008): 624–53; Tony Bennett, “Culture and Governmentality,” in Foucault, Cultural Studies and Governmentality, ed. Jack Bratich, Jeremy Packer and Cameron McCarthy (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2003), 47–62.

29. Inderpal Grewal, Transnational America: Feminisms, Diasporas, Neoliberalisms (Durham, NH: Duke University Press, 2005).

30. Inderpal Grewal, Transnational America: Feminisms, Diasporas, Neoliberalisms (Durham, NH: Duke University Press, 2005), 9.

31. Inderpal Grewal, Transnational America: Feminisms, Diasporas, Neoliberalisms (Durham, NH: Duke University Press, 2005), 11.

32. Inderpal Grewal, Transnational America: Feminisms, Diasporas, Neoliberalisms (Durham, NH: Duke University Press, 2005), 157.

33. Anne Orford, “Beyond Harmonisation: Trade, Human Rights and the Economy of Sacrifice,” in International Law and its Others, ed. Anne Orford(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 156–96.

34. David Kennedy, The Dark Side of Virtue (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004).

35. Douzinas, 64–5.

36. Douzinas, 65.

37. Douzinas, 66.

38. Toby Miller, “Introducing Screening Cultural Studies,” Continuum 7 (1994): 11–44

39. Fuyuki Kurasawa, Global Justice: Human Rights as Practices (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

40. Fuyuki Kurasawa, Global Justice: Human Rights as Practices (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 8.

41. Fuyuki Kurasawa, Global Justice: Human Rights as Practices (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 11.

42. Fuyuki Kurasawa, Global Justice: Human Rights as Practices (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 12.

43. Fuyuki Kurasawa, Global Justice: Human Rights as Practices (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 12.

44. Fuyuki Kurasawa, Global Justice: Human Rights as Practices (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 15.

45. Elizabeth Mertz, “Legal Loci and Places in the Heart: Community and Identity in Sociolegal Studies,” Law and Society Review 28 (1994): 971–92; Rosemary J. Coombe, “Intellectual Property in Neoliberal Regimes of Governmentality: Community Subjects and their Rights,” in The Making and Unmaking of Intellectual Property, ed. Mario Biagioli, Martha Woodmansee and Peter Jaszi (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2010), in press.

46. Mark Goodale, “Toward a Critical Anthropology of Human Rights,” Current Anthropology 47 (2006): 485–511, internal citations omitted.

47. Douzinas, 13.

48. Douzinas, 13.

49. Cowan, Dembour and Wilson, 21. While most anthropologists have moved away from the relativist, functionalist and holistic accounts of culture that dominated the discipline's early colonial period as well as its mid-century rejection of human rights universalism, legal anthropologists have been particularly aware of the origins of the culture concept in comparative law and attuned to law and legal discourse as a socially and politically constitutive force; the anthropology of human rights is a relatively recent subfield that often seeks to “site” culture as it is deployed in diverse struggles.

50. Rosemary J. Coombe, “Owning Culture: Political Economies of Community Subjects and their Properties,” in Ownership and Appropriation, ed. Mark Busse and Veronica Strang (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2010), 105–27.

51. Cowan, Dembour and Wilson, 11.

52. Mark Goodale, “Locating Rights, Envisioning Law Between the Global and the Local,” in The Practice of Human Rights: Tracking Law between the Global and the Local, ed. Sally Engle Merry and Mark Goodale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 1–38; Sally Engle Merry, “Changing Rights, Changing Culture,” in Culture and Rights: Anthropological Perspectives, ed. Jane Cowan, Marie-Benedicte Dembour and Richard Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 31–55; Sally Engle Merry, “Transnational Human Rights and Local Activism: Mapping the Middle,” American Anthropologist 108 (2006): 38–51; Shannon Speed, Rights in Rebellion: Indigenous Struggle and Human Rights in Chiapas (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008).

53. Cowan, Dembour and Wilson, 5–6.

54. Cowan, Dembour and Wilson, 6.

55. Goodale, 2009, 13.

56. Goodale, 2009, 14.

57. Yudice.

58. Michael Brown, “Heritage Trouble: Recent Work on the Protection of Intangible Cultural Property,” International Journal of Cultural Property 12 (2005): 40–61; Rosemary J. Coombe, “The Changing Purview of Cultural Property and its Politics,” Annual Review of Law and Social Science 5 (2009): 393–412.

59. John Comaroff and Jean Comaroff, Ethnicity Inc. (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2009).

60. Rosemary J. Coombe, Steven Schnoor and Mohsen al Attar Ahmed, “Bearing Cultural Distinction: Informational Capital and New Expectations for Intellectual Property,” University of California Davis Law Review 40 (2007): 891–917; Katherine Verdery and Caroline Humphrey, ed., Property in Question: Value Transformations in the Global Economy (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2004).

61. Arjun Appadurai, “The Capacity to Aspire: Culture and the Terms of Recognition,” in Rao and Walton: 59–85; Rosemary J. Coombe and Nicole Aylwin, “Bordering Diversity and Desire: Using Intellectual Property to Mark Place-based Products,” Environment and Planning A (forthcoming); Jonathan Ensor, “Linking Rights and Culture,” in Reinventing Development: Translating Rights-Based Approaches from Theory into Practice, ed. Paul Gready and Jonathan Ensor (London: Zed Books, 2005), 254–77; Sarah A. Radcliffe, ed., Culture and Development in a Globalizing World: Geographies, Actors, and Paradigms (London and New York: Routledge, 2006); Jan Rath, Tourism, Ethnic Diversity and the City (London: Routledge, 2007).

62. Thomas Perreault and Patricia Martin, “Geographies of Neoliberalism in Latin America,” Environment and Planning A 37(2) (2005): 191–201.

63. Liz Bondi and Nina Laurie, “Introduction,” in Working the Spaces of Neoliberalism, ed. Nina Laurie and Liz Bondi (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 1–8.

64. John Clarke, “Living With/in and Without Neoliberalism,” Focaal–European Journal of Anthropology 51 (2008): 135–47.

65. Anna Tsing, Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rosemary J. Coombe

Rosemary Coombe is Senior Canada Research Chair in Law, Communication and Culture at York University