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Call for Papers Theme: Culture and Rights Subtitle: Scepticism, Hostility, Mutuality Type: International Symposium Institution: Department of Anthropology, University of Sydney Location: Sydney, NSW (Australia) Date: 13.–14.6.2012 Deadline: 30.4.2012 __________________________________________________ The relationship between the concept of culture and that of human rights has long been complex and contentious. On the one hand, culture and human rights can be seen as locked in a mutually antagonistic embrace. For many human rights activists, culture has been “demonised” as tantamount to “unfreedom” (Sen 1999; Englund 2004); culture, in this view, is a disguise through which entrenched forms of power and exploitation operate, and a way of naturalizing cultural systems that prevents people from realising their full humanity. Human rights, on the other hand, has been critiqued by anthropologists as a purported universal framing of humanity that conceals metropolitan values, epistemology and interests. Although anthropology and human rights discourse have both been challenged as the metropolitan colonisation of local identity, today the concept of human rights has become a key site of global regimes of accountability as well as a plethora of local struggles over resources, the public voice and the management of the self. As a result, moral and political capital have crystallised around human rights today as both a form of advocacy and a mode of local empowerment. Yet, as Riles (2006) notes, anthropological concepts of cultural difference and universal demands for human rights are not simply antagonistic. The contemporary linkage between global forms of governance and human rights regimes has generated its own anxieties and scepticism within the human rights world, and it is here, Riles suggests, that culture and human rights are mutually oriented towards each other. In the face of this anxiety, culture is not only a set of practices against which rights must be asserted, but culture is increasingly also the ground from which rights take on their meaning. From the point of view of culture, however, rights is the contemporary ‘outside’ that allows the agents of culture to intervene; to rework their own cultural fabric. In this respect, it is intriguing that rights-based perspectives represent significant competition to the long-standing role played by political economy as the outside of culture. For anthropologists the effects of this symbiotic relationship between culture and human rights can be traced at a number of different levels. The relationship between anthropology and human rights has been a key point of debate in the development of anthropological codes of ethics. Human rights, in its discursive and institutional contexts, has become another thematic aspect of anthropologists’ subject matter – rights have been assimilated to culture. The capacity to participate in the dialogue between rights and culture has become integral to the political negotiation of fieldwork in many contemporary contexts, and of its ethical evaluation. It is also the primary discursive frame of a contemporary public anthropology – in the Australian context, the politics of anthropology’s engagement in the broader debate about the state ‘intervention’ in the governance of indigenous communities is particularly revealing. Finally, the increasing interpenetration of rights-based and development-oriented forms of critical inquiry and activism has meant that anthropology’s role in the social science division of labour, in both applied and teaching contexts, is mediated by rights discourse. Nevertheless, distinctively historical and political perspectives in anthropological writing have also generated substantial critiques, not only of human rights discourse, but of the ways it has been mobilised in particular social and political contexts. For this symposium we seek presentations of a maximum of 20 minutes in length, that open both the apparent hostility, and, at the same time, mutual dependence of cultural and rights-based perspectives to inquiry. Please send title and abstracts to [email protected] before Monday 30 April 2012. Conveners: Dr. Gaynor Macdonald, Dr. Neil Maclean Indicative references: Engle, Karen 2001 From Skepticism to Embrace: Human Rights and the American Anthropological Association from 1947–1999. Human Rights Quarterly 23:536–559. Englund, Harri 2006. Prisoners of Freedom: Human Rights and the African Poor. Berkeley: University of California Press. Farmer, Paul 2005. Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor, Berkeley: University of California Press. Merry, Sally Engle 2003. Human Rights Law and the Demonization of Culture (and Anthropology along the Way). Political and Legal Anthropology Review 26(1):55–76. Riles, Annelise 2006. Anthropology, Human Rights, and Legal Knowledge: Culture in the Iron Cage. American Anthropologist 108(1): 52-65. Sen, Amartya 1999. Development as Freedom. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Contact: Dr. Gaynor Macdonald / Dr. Neil Maclean Department of Anthropology Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences University of Sydney RC Mills Building A26 Sydney, NSW 2006 Australia Email: [email protected] Web: http://anthropologycultureandrights.wordpress.com __________________________________________________ InterPhil List Administration: http://interphil.polylog.org Intercultural Philosophy Calendar: http://cal.polylog.org __________________________________________________
