Surrendering to Utopia

An Anthropology of Human Rights

Mark Goodale

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780804762137, 9780804762120
• eBook ISBN: 9780804771214
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Surrendering to Utopia is a critical and wide-ranging study of anthropology's contributions to human rights. Providing a unique window into the underlying political and intellectual currents that have shaped human rights in the postwar period, this ambitious work opens up new opportunities for research, analysis, and political action. At the book's core, the author describes a "well-tempered human rights"—an orientation to human rights in the twenty-first century that is shaped by a sense of humility, an appreciation for the disorienting fact of multiplicity, and a willingness to make the mundaneness of social practice a source of ethical inspiration.

In examining the curious history of anthropology's engagement with human rights, this book moves from more traditional anthropological topics within the broader human rights community—for example, relativism and the problem of culture—to consider a wider range of theoretical and empirical topics. Among others, it examines the link between anthropology and the emergence of "neoliberal" human rights, explores the claim that anthropology has played an important role in legitimizing these rights, and gauges whether or not this is evidence of anthropology's potential to transform human rights theory and practice more generally.

Chapter 1

Introduction

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 legal 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 constitution of political discourse in Indonesia, explains—after asserting the irrelevance to Indonesia of much leading political and social theory—that his “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).¹

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 an “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 too 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 goal 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 experience that matter—legal, religious, political, economic. So we are left with either a philosophically rich but phenomenologically thin set of explanations for social life on the one hand or, on the other, a set of general ideas of real importance that are nevertheless kept frustratingly incipient—the social theory that dare not speak its name.

This dichotomy is of course a false one. There is no reason why anthropologists or others interested in making sense of contemporary social practice in a way that resonates beyond the mere case study, the mere collection of disconnected human exotica, should be forced to either observe and faithfully record or drown in a sea of theoretical foundationalism. The costs of this false choice are never simply, or even primarily, academic. It is perhaps too obvious to emphasize that ideas, and systems of ideas, have a tremendous impact across any number of social and regional planes. Ideas become quickly politicized, especially ideas that claim to affect basic economic or legal or cultural realities. Systems of ideas are products of intellectual histories, and their influence on people and institutions can be tracked within broader historical trajectories. Some ways of finding order in—or ordering—the legal, social, and political are more powerful than others. And systems of ideas, like other systems, both express and constitute broader alignments within which knowledge, money, political capital, and other resources are unequally distributed within any given assemblage, global or otherwise (Ong and Collier 2005).

For example, the entire bundle of liberal political and legal theory to which Bowen either refers or alludes expresses, despite obvious internal nuances, a set of unifying assumptions about both the nature of things—including social things—and the types of knowledge of them that are legitimate.² And this bundle, this system of ideas, is one that establishes the only permissible framework within which a whole set of current political and social processes can unfold, from European Union expansion and consolidation, to the establishment of transitional justice operations in post-conflict settings, to the proliferation of international human rights instruments and models of rights-based normative practice. But if Bowen is right, and this system of ideas is structurally deficient and thus inapplicable to contemporary Indonesia, not in this or that legal or political context, or in light of this or that set of historical circumstances, but per se, then its presence in Indonesia—through international and transnational political institutions, networks of economic relations of production, or even within academic or expert analysis of the country—reflects much more than simply the poverty of this particular theoretical bundle; it is the expression of power through ideas.

Yet the alternative—the development of compelling ideas about certain times and places that are formally contextual but that actually speak to more widely observable patterns of legal, political, and social practice—is the expression of a different kind of power, the ability to restrict the scope of ideas, to force them into prefigured modes of acceptable discourse, even though they are potentially much more transformative. If Bowen has demonstrated the social fact that in Indonesia value-pluralism is itself a value that is both the empirical and the normative basis for a sustainable political community, this fact turns the history of dominant political theory as it has evolved over the last three hundred years on its head. And although Bowen does not allude to it, his analysis of Indonesia also challenges several popular—and, in certain political and academic circles, influential—antitheses of foundationalist social and political theory, most obviously work indebted to pragmatism and neo-pragmatism.

I am thinking here of the line of critique of foundationalist liberal political and legal theory—including human rights—represented most clearly by the work of Richard Rorty and his European interpreters (e.g., Zygmunt Bauman). In his essay “Human Rights, Rationality, and Sentimentality” (1993), Rorty argues that no foundationalist theory of values can ever be the best framework for ethical and political practice; rather, the main objective for intellectuals or politicians, or anyone else in a position to influence others, should be to foster solidarity across cultural, national, and historical boundaries.

Now Rorty could very well be correct; it could very well be true that “nothing relevant to moral choice separates human beings from animals,” or (I would add) one group of human beings from another. But this fact (if true) would unfortunately tell us nothing of importance about value-pluralism in Indonesia, in particular the way it appears to be foundational in a very traditional (though not metaphysical) sense and, even more, the way its foundationalism is the basis for its legitimacy—or, as Rorty might say, its effectiveness.

If value-pluralism in Indonesia has indeed developed into a metavalue, a normative framework that urges, or demands, or facilitates the coexistence of multiple values or systems of values—legal, political, and, in this case in particular, religious—then there is, in a very important sense, at least one “first principle” in terms of which contemporary Indonesia must be understood. And what is even more critical to recognize is the fact that a researcher and analyst like Bowen does not create this first principle by describing the ethnographic or historical data that reveal it, or by formally articulating it in a way that gives it a certain amount of structure by contextualizing it in relation to other similar—or dissimilar—first principles, or by making claims about its cross-cultural relevance.

Rather, the “first principle,” and the social theory that it implies, is simply a fact of ethical, legal, and religious life in Indonesia. To say this is not to claim that this particular first principle is either objectively universal (explanatory and present in all places at all times) or ontologically foundational (immanent to a particular place or group of people, in Indonesia or elsewhere). But it is to leave open the possibility that this first principle—value-pluralism—either is, or might someday become, “locally universal,” that its subjective transcendence is precisely what makes it such a compelling ordering principle for social actors and institutions and political parties and religious leaders. In other words, foundationalism and universalism are themselves ideas that can become particularly meaningful in social practice, and the anthropologist (or other researcher or cultural critic) does a valuable service by making their importance and power topics for close engagement and critical scrutiny.

AT THE MOST GENERAL LEVEL, this book is a sustained argument for a type of engagement with human rights that combines the empirical with the conceptual in a way that avoids the strained opposition between intentionally ungrounded and deductive political and social theory on the one hand and intentionally grounded and carefully circumscribed case studies on the other. This approach can be understood as an “anthropology of human rights,” but I must underscore the fact that although I will draw from particular intellectual histories in order to develop the book’s propositions, I do not intend this to be an argument for disciplinary prerogative. Indeed, it will strike some as immediately odd that anthropology would form part of the foundation for an alternative approach to human rights, particularly in light of anthropology’s marginalization from most of the dominant developments in human rights since the late 1940s. This story of marginalization, which will be explored in chapter 2, provides a window into the underlying political and intellectual currents that have shaped the emergence of both the international and the transnational human rights regimes. This history is also one that reveals a reservoir of potential, one that I will draw from throughout this book as I suggest ways in which an anthropology of human rights opens up several new spaces for research, analysis, and political action.

There are two broad developments that make the argument for an anthropology of human rights both timely and justified. First, the last twenty years have revealed something essential about contemporary human rights. Despite the end of the Cold War (a key event for my purposes) and a set of economic and political developments that have both accelerated preexisting forces (the consolidation of a multinational corporate capitalist mode of production) and initiated new ones (the emergence of midsize transnational political actors), human rights theory and practice remain static.

The constellation of Western liberal legal and political theories that formed the foundation for the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights—and most of the follow-on instruments—remains the dominant intellectual resource within the international human rights system, even if this fact has led to a series of fissures or points of tension, particularly with the emergence of what I will describe in chapter 6 as neoliberal human rights. Even if one can make an argument on simple political grounds that the United Nations committee working on the Universal Declaration was, despite the rhetoric of inclusiveness, compelled to choose between competing philosophical worldviews, it is less obvious why liberal (or neoliberal) legal and political theory should continue to prove so foundational when this political choice is no longer necessary.

This is a particularly charged dilemma, especially since the “global community” that ratified the Universal Declaration was a much more constricted, colonial, and provincial place, a time when the diversity of the ethical, the political, and the legal was either unknown or known only to a small group of relatively obscure scholars or colonial officials, whose interests compelled them to deny, suppress, or work to destroy it. What this means is that contemporary human rights theory—if not “practice,” which has a unified meaning only in certain broad international frames of reference—is vestigial, a tangled set of ideas and philosophical assumptions about human nature, the ontological status of the individual, and the possibilities for ordering collectivities through reason, which remains entrenched even though the contexts of its emergence—though not, perhaps, its purposes—have disintegrated.

But there is a second reason why a book like this is appropriate at this time. Since about the late 1980s, anthropologists have re-engaged with human rights on a number of different levels: first political, then ethnographic, and now—but only incipiently—conceptual. The arguments in this book are grounded in this recent period in anthropology’s relationship with human rights. The growing body of ethnographic research on human rights constitutes, among other things, an expanding database on how human rights are actually becoming transnational and increasingly hegemonic, which makes it an excellent resource to draw from in developing a set of critical tools for understanding the relationship between human rights and local ethical practice. I will examine the reasons why anthropologists reoriented themselves toward human rights in the next chapter; suffice it to say here that the narrative is a complicated one, in which the process of engagement on the political level was initiated without any real theoretical guidance from within mainstream anthropology itself, while the later transformation of human rights practice into a topic for ethnographic and reflective inquiry was in part a response to the rapid expansion of human rights discourse after the end of the Cold War.

Essais and Interventions

In order to give the reader a firm sense of what to expect in this book, it would be more accurate to describe the chapters that follow as a series of interconnected critical essays. This is a signal that in building toward a broader anthropological account of human rights, I do so through a number of pointed, bounded, and admittedly idiosyncratic interventions that are not meant to serve as comprehensive surveys of, or definitive introductions to, the different topics that form the grist for the book’s mill (think Montaigne rather than, say, Sir James Frazer). These essais also do not add up to a grand theory of human rights. Indeed, as we will see, an argument that threads throughout the book is that our understanding of human rights theory and practice in the postwar period has been impoverished by the dominance of just such theories, and the epistemology that they reflect.

Instead, the book’s chapters are meant to bind together a series of arguments that, taken together, constitute an anthropo...

Table of contents

• Advance Praise for Surrendering to Utopia
• Stanford Studies in Human Rights
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Prologue - The phenomenology of human rights at 35,000 feet . . .
• Chapter 1 - Introduction
• Chapter 2 - Becoming Irrelevant
• Chapter 3 - Encountering Relativism
• Chapter 4 - Culture on the Half Shell
• Chapter 5 - Human Rights along the Grapevine
• Chapter 6 - Rights Unbound
• Conclusion - Human Rights in an Anthropological Key
• Appendix 1 - STATEMENT ON HUMAN RIGHTS
• Appendix 2 - Declaration on Anthropology and Human Rights Committee for Human Rights American Anthropological Association
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Stanford Studies in Human Rights
• About the Cover Image