Anthropology, Human Rights, and Legal Knowledge: Culture in the Iron Cage

Abstract

In this article, I draw on ethnography in the particular zone of engagement between anthropologists, on the one hand, and human rights lawyers who are skeptical of the human rights regime, on the other hand. I argue that many of the problems anthropologists encounter with the appropriation and marginalization of anthropology's analytical tools can be understood in terms of the legal character of human rights. In particular, discursive engagement between anthropology and human rights is animated by the pervasive instrumentalism of legal knowledge. I contend that both anthropologists who seek to describe the culture of human rights and lawyers who critically engage the human rights regime share a common problem—that of the “iron cage” of legal instrumentalism. I conclude that an ethnographic method reconfigured as a matter of what I term circling back—as opposed to cultural description—offers a respite from the hegemony of legal instrumentalism.

Human rights, Indigenous peoples and the concept of Free, Prior and Informed Consent

“…Anthropologists in general -as reflected in an American Anthropological Association (AAA) statement of 1947 (AAA, The Executive Board 1947) -were critical of the concept of universal human rights, which they considered to be a Western ethnocentric concept (Messer 1993;Preis 1996;Riles 2006). The major arguments of the AAA statement were that rights are culturally relative and that Western notions of progress should not be imposed on other cultures.…”

“…In its 1999 Statement about Human Rights, the AAA embraced the human rights discourse; however, it pointed to the need for advocating for collective and cultural rights and for tolerance across different cultures (Messer 1993;AAA 1999;Engle 2001;Riles 2006). Wright (1988) discussed the dilemmas anthropology found itself in during those decades, as the native peoples it studied were facing a range of problems, as described above, and often their very survival was in question.…”

Toward a Critical Anthropology of Human Rights

“…It is not that the kinds of critiques and arguments that Goodale proposes are absent in the human rights world. On the contrary, as I and others have shown (Riles 2006;Redfield 2005;Rosga 2005), a skeptical, critical, self-reflexive, and theoretically informed understanding of human rights regimes is almost a hallmark of human rights expertise. In my experience, all sophisticated human rights actors take it as a starting point of their expert competence that while one talks as if rights were absolute, one understands that in practice they are always constructed and, unfortunately, compromised by people like themselves.…”

International policy, development expertise, and anthropology

“…For example, from this view, the World Bank's now much criticized idea of social capital would be regarded not as demonstrating the power of the Bank to depoliticize development (the common criticism) but as the outcome of tactical concessions by a vulnerable group of social scientists to economics paradigms, a (globally exported) survival strategy within a mega-organization (Mosse, forthcoming). Then ethnographers such as Annelise Riles (2001) conduct ethnography on and through the analytical forms of expert ideas themselves, their effects, the precedence of form over content, style over substance, their production of forms of sociality as in 'the network. ' Finally, in their ethnographic pursuit of the social context of development's traveling rationalities, anthropologists turn attention to the social lives of international experts and development professionals (perhaps even ourselves).…”

“…From this come cosmopolitan and technocratic claims. Professionalism (career building) requires recovering the universal from the particular, technocratic knowledge from the illicit relationships upon which it is actually based conceding what is known from experience to the simple instrumentality of the models of employers, bosses, or supporters (Riles 2004). For different reasons, both the World Bank's investors and borrowers and the charitable donors to Oxfam require the "illusion of certainty" from their experts (Woods 2006).…”