Issues in Cultural Rights
Cultural Relativism
• Cultural relativism—that a person’s beliefs and
actions are conditioned by her culture, and
must be understood within her cultural
context.
• Cultural relativism supposes that we are limited
by our cultural/ world view, and that no culture
can claim universality, or a monopoly on
civilization. Our cultural upbringing provides us
with a filter through which we process and
interpret what we experience and believe, yet we
must understand the limits of the filter to
understand how unfamiliar cultures’ value
systems work and what our biases are towards
them.
• The term has also been used by people who find
multiculturalism suspect, who feel that valuing cultural
diversity and suggesting that all cultures have inherent
worth risks condoning cultural practices that infringe
upon human rights, like genital mutilation. If right and
wrong are constructed in each culture, then those
values are not universal; and the logic follows that one
cannot judge the actions of another when that person
is from a different value system. For example, that the
5000 honor killings that occur each year cannot be
questioned by those outside the culture.
It IS all relative, however…
• Rights for one culture are not necessarily valid
to another. The purchase and use of private
property, for example, is different in different
cultures. The universal declaration not so
universal.
• All human rights are cultural rights as they are
culturally constructed. (See Remedi’s article)
Collectivism vs. individualism
• Konai Thaman in chapter 1 of Culture, Rights,
and Cultural Rights ed by Margaret Wilson,
speaks of the Pacific Peoples privileging of
collective rights over individual rights, which
fall within the larger context of a social web.
Schooling is part of collective experience.
Western thought with its focus on individual
rights is alien to them.
How to define culture?
• There is a divide between definitions of
culture as anthropological practice, and
culture as aesthetic practice (tools, buying
practices, use of land vs. art, dance, music).
There is confusion in some documents.
(Culture and Rights by Cowan, Dembour and
Wilson, p. 130-132—critique of the UNESCO
definition of culture)
International Law’s Influence
• Five human rights are understood by international law
as cultural rights:
1. the right to education
2. the right to participate in cultural life
3. the right to enjoy the benefits of scientific progress and
its applications
4. the right to benefit from the protection of the moral
and material interests resulting from any scientific,
literary, or artistic production of which the person is
the author
5. freedom for scientific research and creative activity
Other problems…
• Cultural autonomy/ self-determination seen as conflicting
with nation rights (and international imperialism), which is
one reason it is ignored in human rights treaties like the
Universal Declaration.
• HRW and Amnesty focus exclusively on “first generation
rights” which are political and civil; ignore later generation
rights.
• International law guides a lot of the focus on civil and
political rights. It also has forced some cultures to fix their
identity, in order to qualify for recognition (Consider
Affirmative Action laws which gave federal funding to
established minority groups, or the recognition of the
Pequots in CT)
Fluidity of culture vs. fixed tradition
• We will see with article on Big Brother Africa, that the
media flooding of one country with the culture of another
can cause a country to pull into itself and focus on its
traditions, rather than by letting the flood change the
nature of their cultural practices.
• Certain cultures (many Arabic) value tradition over
innovation, and see change as heretical and dangerous.
• Anthropologists once saw jungle cultures frozen in time,
otherness as fixed, now realize that all cultures are
inherently fluid, which @ Bruce Robbins in “Reflections on
Culture and Cultural Rights”, is viewed with suspicion as yet
another strategy to dismiss cultural otherness.
Are whites in Britain indigenous?
• What indigenous need rights protection?
• “The term ‘indigenous’ is itself conceptually based around
the relation of the original population to that of their
colonizers. The construction of an indigenous identity can
in one sense be understood as a reaction to the historical
projection of the Indian as the ‘other’, subjected to policies
of assimilation or eradication. The distinctive criteria for
indigenous populations are therefore primordialism and
cultural difference”….”in order to gain self-determination,
indigenous movements evoke the language of historical
continuity, on which they stake their claim to collective
identity.” (“The Inconvenient Indigenous Peoples,’ by Sidsel
Saugestad, Indigenous Affairs 2/1993, 205)
Cultural Rights only recently
recognized
• Universal declaration no recognition of group
rights or rights of a minority culture as distinct
from a majority one
• Cultural rights not acknowledged til 1966.
Decolonization comes, but cultural rights do not
rise in tandem with self-determination. Little
attention from UN, int’l treaty bodies, public
opinion. First steps only occur after thawing of
cold war, “when North/South divide made culture
central to contention over human rights”
Guardians of Culture—Who are they?
• Problem: Are rights universal at all if we take
culture into consideration? Who are the
guardians of cultural rights: the nation-state,
the international community, or cultural
groups themselves, many of whom don’t
identify with a nation-state?
Cultural Rights belong to nation state
• Cuba and Iran have put on the table the issue of
cultural rights. “[D]ifferences of national culture, which
they describe as rights, are mobilized so as to
undermine the universality of rights. Instead of setting
culture against rights, however, the Iranian initiative
entitled “Dialogue Among Civilizations” tried out the
innovative proposition that culture could be seen as
itself a right: a right possessed by nations, and thus a
right that in effect subverted other rights. A 2002
Cuban Initiative on cultural rights, arguing that all local
cultures must be protected against globalization, was
again formulated so as to present cultural rights as
rights belonging to the nation-state.
Cultural Rights belong to Groups
• On the other hand, interest in cultural rights
has also emerged out of movements on behalf
of indigenous peoples and minorities, groups
understood to be sub-national or
transnational, in other words not congruent
with presently-existing states.
Contradiction here
• In short, these two vectors of interest in cultural rights
contradict each other. As with the right of selfdetermination, they collide over the proper scale or
object to which the category should be applied– that is,
over what entity should be the proper bearer of
cultural rights. One assigns cultural rights to nations,
seeking thereby to protect small nations from larger
and more powerful ones. The other assigns cultural
rights to indigenous peoples and minorities, seeking to
defend them against the nations– against small as well
as large nations– within which they are located.
Contradiction cont.
• Unless and until it becomes possible for states to be
bearers of rights– something for which there is
currently no basis in international law– there will be no
dilemma here, legally speaking….But politically
speaking, both of these motives for interest in cultural
rights are obviously worthy of serious consideration;
both impulses, however contradictory, will have to be
taken into account by anyone seeking to extend
respect for rights into more of a rights-abusing world.
And one might argue indeed that here, as elsewhere,
the opposition between law and politics cannot be
sustained.