Human Rights Research:

The Challenge for Anthropologists © see full citation below

Theodore E. Downing 1

All cultures define moral and ethical principles for proper human interaction.'Such logics apply not only to their conduct with respect to one another, but also to those outside their culture. The logics, in their totality, represent a culture's definition of human rights. 2 2

The precise content of human rights logics varies between and within the same culture at different times. Yet, the logics also tend to share critical, perhaps universal dimensions. To help examine how these specific and common dimensions might be investigated, I use a common anthropological technique -I examine a contemporary issue in another culture, time and place. First, I identify eight common dimensions of human rights principles. Next, I describe an insightful typology of the macrologics underlying human rights principles to illustrate a theoretical frontier with which anthropologists might articulate their ethnographic findings on human rights. Finally, I present a cluster of microlevel questions which those who wish to contribute to the search and struggle for human rights might consider.

Another Culture and Another Time

In 1215, at the meadow called Runnymede, betwixt Windsor and Stanes, King John of England begrudgingly signed the Magna Carta. This document, heralded as an early victory in subsequent struggles for human rights, merits close inspection. The concerns of the advocates of the Magna Carta are quite divorced from most contemporary human rights questions. The English clergy and barons were not concerned about securing rights for all men. The lengthy Great Charter supports a landed aristocracy's rights as opposed to those of the king. It sought to redefine the rules for interaction between the sovereign and significant thirteenth-century English classes. Specifically, it reallocates rights among social groups: the barons, the Church, holders of Crown lands, Welshmen, Jews, freemen, knights and so forth. In fact, if the Magna Carta was the only source of ethnographic information on thirteenth-century England, it would not only indicate the society's salient social groups but also their critical social, economic and political problems.

The values and privileges of that time are evident. Rights are granted for the use of Church property, access to the judiciary system, Crown lands, forest lands and so forth. Likewise, the social problems clearly reflect an agrarian society with a land-based system of political power. Claims relate to issues of guardianship, protection of widows' property, access to royal forest, custom duties, standardization of weights and measures, treatment of Welshmen in England and ownership of Church property. Although statements appear in the document supporting the rights of particular individuals, such idiosyncratic claims may be ignored, as they do not set a precedent for future conduct. Thus, the first dimension of human rights propositions can be identified: human rights propositions invoke claims to specific goods and privileges by specific groups in a specific era.

A caveat, however, is necessary. Although the claimants' rights would obligate others to relinquish theirs, the expression of human rights should never be confused with the act of discrimination. The latter involves differential treatment of members of social groups who face the same situations (Alexis 1976:150) whereas human rights principles express ideological goals, expectations and values of a specific group which may or may not be a reality.

Seven other dimensions of human rights principles merit consideration. Among these is the characteristic that the formalization of rights in documents such as the Magna Carta emerges during periods of extreme social, political or economic transformation and turmoil. Those demanding rights in early thirteenth-century English society were faced with heavy taxation for the Third Crusade and payment for the ransom for Richard 1. When King John signed the Magna Carta, the country was under threat of civil war. Likewise, the US Bill of Rights, the French Rights of Men and Citizens, and the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights emerged from periods of tension, stress and redefinition of social boundaries.

A third dimension of human rights principles concerns formalization of these rights within a specific culture. It would be incorrect to assume that human rights principles only appear in documents such as the US Bill of Rights and similar written doctrines found in Western European history. After a century of ethnographic work, anthropologists believe that all societies have human rights propositions. In most societies, these rights are not formalized in written charters. For example, Zapotec Indians in southeastern Mexico consider the right of all children to obtain equal shares of their parents' estates and the right of parents to superannuity from their children as two fundamental rights in their society (Downing 1973, 1979). Neither of these rights nor any other basic Zapotec rights are codified in a formal declaration. Yet this lack of formal written documentation does not make the rights any less important to the Zapotecs than formally documented rights are to individuals in other cultures. Such principles are real, meaningful and an intrinsic part of the culture. No social group can survive without a set of normative propositions concerning what is proper interaction among its salient classes or groups.

A fourth dimension of human rights principles involves the option to deny individuals or groups access to certain human rights, as a sanction necessary for social control. From the perspective of the present, the specific denials may appear astonishing. The same Magna Carta which contains precursors of what would eventually become the right to habeas corpus, the petition of right and the rights of those taxed to representation, is blatantly male chauvinistic. It rigidly circumscribes the legal rights of women by declaring that

None shall be taken or imprisoned upon the appeal of a woman, for the death of any other than her husband (Costain 1949:313).

In ancient Greece, homicide was punished by banishment, which is the complete denial of an offender's rights to the comfort, privileges and protection of his own group. Likewise, Rome offered its citizens exile (exsilium) as an alternative to the death penalty. Institutions may simultaneously protect and deny human rights. This is most notable in institutions charged with protecting and interpreting violations of normative principles, as occurs in the establishment of a Council of 25 Barons, in the Magna Carta or the judiciary systems of complex societies.

Another dimension of human rights principles is that they set standards by which a society may judge its own performance. A culture's evaluations of its moral status is based, in part, on the adherence of its members to moral standards that they hold in common. Considerable social energy is expended on setting and maintaining these standards. In relatively small societies, standards are set through discussion, moral dialogue, rituals and symbolic activities. In complex societies, the task becomes institutionalized and involves complex bureaucracies, legal institutions, juridical procedures and training. In such societies, the social sciences themselves often play an important role in this evaluative process.

A sixth dimension of human rights principles concerns unpredictable behavior, which is an anathema to orderly social reproduction. Consequently, human rights propositions not only set standards of conduct but also increase the predictability and intentionality of human interaction. The Great Charter meticulously delineates the proper conduct for sovereigns and barons at the time of succession, thereby allowing claimants to anticipate and judge one another's actions during the stressful process an intergenerational transfer of wealth creates.

Human rights principles also provide a code of acceptable conduct for nonmembers of a culture, whom I call outsiders. Thus, additional logics guide interorganizational and intersocietal interaction (e.g., diplomatic immunity, taxation codes, etc.). A rudimentary form of such propositions appears in the Magna Carta, defining and limiting the rights of two types of outsiders in thirteenth-century English society, Welshmen and Jews. With respect to the latter, the document explicitly limits the rights of Jews.

If any person have [sic) borrowed money of Jews, more or less, and die before they have paid the debt, the debt shall not grow whilst the heir is under age; and if such debt become due to us, we will take no more than the goods expressed in deed.... And if any die, and owe a debt to the Jews, his wife shall have her dower, and shall be charged with no part of the debt; and if the children of the deceased person be within age, their reasonable estovers shall be provided them, according to the value of the estate which their ancestor had; and the debt shall be paid out of the residue, saving the services due to the lord (Costain 1949:307).

As the world has become a global village, the rights of outsiders within another culture have become increasingly important. Not only are more outsiders present within another culture, but their plights are relatively quickly known to members of their own culture as well. For example, in this volume, other authors discuss undocumented Mexican aliens in the United States and new immigrants in Israel. Anthropologists, as well as strangers in the cultures they study, quickly discover their own outsider rights (or lack thereof).

A seventh characteristic of human rights principles concerns their degree of accretion within the social institutions and customs of a society. In June 1215, the rights granted in the Magna Carta were considered by the grantor to be politically expedient and temporary concessions. However, after the repeated application of these rights and the formation of social institutions specifically concerned with their protection and application, certain of these rights became deeply embedded in English, Commonwealth, United States and international law.

The concept of accretion is important. If the practices that protect or deny the human rights of people are weakly grafted onto a society, representing the product of particular individuals, groups, administrations or weakly articulated institutions, they may be more easily changed. A "Mission Impossible," a paramilitary "A-Team," the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) or a modification of certain laws may be capable of altering human history, disrupting and destroying weakly articulated rights. But when rights are deeply embedded in an institutional or cultural ethos, changes in human rights require fundamental cultural change, with all the attendant problems that anthropologists have described over the past 40 years.

Recognizing that many human rights issues are ideological expressions of deeper social struggles, class conflicts, organizational and value differences, and economic confrontations within specific social organizations, and that they often become most volatile under conditions of socioeconomic stress, it follows that the logic of human rights is subject to considerable flux. Thus, the eighth dimension of human rights principles is that they change. Those that actively work on human rights problems have repeatedly recognized this dynamic.

The field of human rights is constantly evolving not only because ideas of what constitutes human dignity change but also because, as society changes, needs arise for new forms of protection (Teltsch 1981:3).

As capitalism and industrialization waxed over the past three centuries, human rights issues shifted from the agrarian rights problems appearing in the Magna Carta to problems of equal pay for equal work, protection of workers from arbitrary acts by employers, the rights of workers to organize and the rights of women and ethnic minorities. Most recently, UN declarations, covenants and conventions have focused primarily upon the rights of citizens vis-à-vis the nation-state.

It follows that in the present multicultural, multiethnic and multinational world, varied ideologies coexist and compete at all levels in the hierarchy of human organizations. These levels range from relatively isolated tribal groups in the upper Amazon to nation-states, to nongovernmental associations, to transnational corporations. At every level, people continuously codify and modify, clarify and obscure, adopt and reject, interpret and reinterpret propositions concerning what ought to be proper human interaction. Sorting out the hierarchies of logics concerning human rights proves a formidable task.

Macro-Micro Level Problems

To introduce the vast range of problems involved in the anthropological investigation of human rights, I concentrate on a difficult problem that is closely related to the ethnographic concerns for studying human rights-articulating macrologics with micrologics.

The macro-micro problem appears quite frequently in applied anthropological discussions of human rights and is a product of the aforementioned hierarchical, dynamic nature of human rights propositions. For example, a subordinate group's adoption of a normative proposition advocated by a supraorganization on an issue, such as the rights of women, requires adjustment of broad general issues to a specific set of human interactions. The subordinate organization may choose (or be forced) to incorporate, reject or ignore the proposition. Conversely, supraorganizations often must deal with propositions resulting from the actions or logics of subordinate organizations that are within their sphere of influence. Such microlevel logic may challenge the supraorganization's own logic concerning human rights or other issues. An important part of the problem of applied anthropology consists of analyzing actual or projected interaction between microlevel/macrolevel relationships. To better understand applied anthropologists' contributions to human rights, it is helpful to examine one of the more powerful macrolevel theories and the problems that arise in an attempt to apply it to practical human rights problems.

Falkian Macro-Theory

One of the outstanding political theorists in the area of human rights, Richard A. Falk at Princeton University, offers considerable assistance by disaggregating various global, "competing normative logics" concerning human rights (Falk 1980). Normative logic refers to "a set of propositions about what ought to happen with respect to relations among basic actors in the world system" (Falk 1980:66). Falk argues that since the Peace of Westphalia, the prevailing logic has been statist. Statist logic postulates a world of juridical and political equality among nation-states, wherein human rights issues are seen as domestic problems, the exclusive prerogative of the nation-state. States hold one another responsible for controlling their own domestic affairs and adhere to a policy of nonintervention.

Hegemonial logic, in contrast, recognizes the basic inequality among nation-states. It presumes a correlation between power and virtue, with the powerful holding a moral obligation to protect the internal order of weaker global actors. Under such logic, weaker states may be coerced, remunerated or encouraged to adopt the dominant power's version of human rights. The mechanisms for exercising this logic include diplomatic pressure, withholding of aids and credits, comforting the dissident elements of another nation-state, and, of course, military intervention. Hegemonial logic may be used to support the reestablishment of political authority in situations where a weaker nation appears unwilling or unable to remain under the hegemonic power's protective umbrella.

Thucydides provides us with one of the earliest examples of hegemonial logic. In 460 BC, the Athenians mounted an expedition against the Isle of Melos with

thirty ships of their own, six Chian and two Lesbian vessels, sixteen hundred heavy infantry, three hundred archers, and twenty mounted archers from Athens and about fifteen hundred heavy infantry from the allies and the islanders (Thucydides 1952, XVII:84).

Before the battle, the Athenians sent an envoy to the Melian commissioners and the dialogue is reported to have been as follows:

Melians: ... we see you come to be judges in your own case and that all we can reasonably expect from this negotiation is war, if we prove to have right on our side and refuse to submit, and in the contrary case, slavery.

Athenians: ... You know as well as we do that right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power; while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.

Suffer they did, for the Melians were subsequently defeated and all their men put to death, their women and children sold into slavery and their lands inhabited by Athenian colonists. More recently, this logic might be applied to the recent interventions by Syria and Israel in Lebanon, by Russia in Afghanistan and by the US in Grenada. Hegemonic logic is not limited to superpowers, but may also be used to justify "benevolent interventions" of supranational organizations, such as those the International Monetary Foundation has made in Mexico and Brazil.

Naturalistic logic is based on the idea that "certain rights inhere in human nature and should be respected by all organized societies" (Thucydides 1952:78). Questions concerning human rights are viewed as a basic, common moral force. Naturalistic logic is sometimes appealed to by hegemonial powers wishing popular support for interventions in the affairs of weaker states or justifying their internal human rights policies.

When nation-states share a common interest concerning what they consider to be proper human interaction, yet another form of logic appears which appeals to a set of values and expectations that they share. This form of st4pranational logic defines the "rules of the game" for international behavior. Supranational logic takes on both a regional form, as is the case in the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) or the OAS (Organization of American States), and a functional form, as is the case in OPEC (Organization of Petroleum Exporting States), the "South," "LDCS" (less developed countries), the Non-Aligned Movement and the Group of 77. Supranational logic is most commonly heard in the UN General Assembly, where standards and norms have been set for judging the behavior of nation-states. Nonetheless, the UN has never implemented any of its supranational resolutions, since it is dominated by statist and hegemonial logic.

Falk continues with his macropolitical theory by distinguishing supranational logic from transnational logic. Transnational logic refers to an ordering of nongovernmental activities that crosses national boundaries. Transnational corporations are the most visible actors operating at this level, but other organizations use it, such as Amnesty International, the International League for Human Rights, the International Commission of jurists, the World Council of Churches, Cultural Survival, the National Council of Churches and the Third World Forum.

Finally, Falk identifies the weakest and potentially most subversive of the ordering logics, which he calls "populist." Populist logic rejects the 5 previous logics by insisting that governmental and intergovernmental organizations do not hold a monopoly of legitimized authority. It advocates the radical proposition that human rights derive "from the people," rather than through a legitimizing national, transnational or supranational organization. Its expression may be found in activities such as Bertrand Russell's War Crimes Tribunal and the holding of "counter conferences" concurrent with meetings organized along statist and hegemonial lines. Although Falk does not specify the following, populist logic also underlies the widespread reemergence of supranational fundamentalist religious sects.

Projections of Future Human Rights Issues

Falk employs his six-part typology to project several alternative global futures of human rights, each based on a different perception of the changing world order. The details of his projections need not concern us, but they range from a mild reordering of the global stage, as American hegemony wanes, to more radical futures, wherein the nation-state system erodes and a new planetary polity emerges with its associated beliefs, values and myths. The latter future has two variants, one a centralized tyranny, the other, a decentralized polity, with the central guidance dedicated to the growth of functional activities. In either case, supranational logic greatly expands at the expense of state and populist logic.

But Falk's macrotheory and projected futures seem rather abstract and remote from the contemporary human rights problems confronting an applied anthropologist analyzing human rights problems in a specific cultural context. Unless anthropologists assume that microlevel ideologies and actions are merely microcosmic representations of macrolevel ideologies and actions that they observe in the field -and I have tried to point out that we cannot so assume-anthropologists face serious theoretical and methodological problems. Falk seems aware of the weakness of his own theory as a tool for projecting possible futures when he approaches the question of micrologics of groups subordinate to the nation-state.

The protection of human rights in a given world order system is not rigidly the exclusive preserve of any one of the ordering logics. It all depends on the value base that animates a given political actor at any level of social organization. As racist and militants' movements have demonstrated, repressive intolerance can rise from below (via populist logic) as well as imposed from above (via states logic) (Falk 1980:107-108).

Moreover, if all social organizations have human rights propositions and if these propositions become increasingly context-specific as one slides closer to the micro side of the macro/micro spectrum, then it follows that political actions anthropologists observe seldom reflect macrolevel logics. As human rights propositions are reexamined within their cultural context, clusters of propositions, kindred to those Falk identified, will undoubtedly appear at subordinate levels.

Moreover, varieties and fragments of the macrologics described by Falk originated as micrologics. In philosophical and political debates, micrologics have been eventually extended into macrolevel propositions. For example, micrologics expounded by such marginal men as Hamilton, Jay, Madison, Angels, Marx and Lenin, have ignited uncontrollable grass fires in favor of two complex, distinct views of human rights. On a far more modest scale, most anthropologists have been fortunate enough to hear nonliterate peoples express equally complex principles concerning their rights as a member of their culture.

Anthropologists have struggled with this problem since Redfield's pioneering work on the Great and Little Traditions. They have discovered local-level responses to such global changes which have proven to be quite unpredictable and varied. What has been discovered is that local-level organizations modify, interpret, adapt and incorporate external ideologies to fit their own objectives and constraints. Falk's projective methodology and global theory fails to consider this anthropological dimension to human rights and, as a result, is wanting. It is within this arena that applied anthropologists are most likely to make significant contributions. Fortunately, these contributions will be made not only to the peoples whom they study, but also to a basic goal of the profession, understanding social and ideological change.

On the Horizon: Unresolved Issues

Multiple problems, which range beyond the issues of specific individual transgressions or a particular group's problems maintaining or defending their human rights, await applied anthropologists working in the area of human rights. Once one steps - below the macrolevel considered by Falk, the world becomes, and is still, exceedingly diverse and complex. Important theoretical and practical discoveries lie within the realm of empirical investigations of nested hierarchies of human rights.

The first problem might be called that of "sorting things out." Most of the human rights propositions of the societies that anthropologists study have not been sufficiently described such that those seeking to change or defend them may clearly see what they are. Making them explicit requires careful ethnographic fieldwork and ethnological analysis. The sorting problem becomes urgent as the powerless groups that anthropologists study become more tightly meshed in the world political economy. Their rights may be trampled so quickly that they may never be known or defended.

The scope of this task is staggering. It may well be impossible to sort out all the human rights logics in the multitude of societies, organizations and minority groups of the world since by the time they were catalogued, they would have changed or been lost.

Students interested in human rights may begin work immediately, even before they go to the field, by extracting the propositions from ethnographic literature. This work may be tested and verified by subsequent fieldwork, including discussing the propositions with individuals or panels of individuals in the field. Once in the field, such students must make an extraordinary effort to understand the semantics of the language spoken in the culture. Once this understanding is achieved, certain dimensions of the problem need to be considered. These include answering such questions as:

What social groups hold human rights propositions7 What are these propositions7

What rights do they protect?

What assumptions underlie them? To whom do they apply7

Under what circumstances may the protections they provide be withdrawn from an individual?

Which propositions are shared in common with supraordinate social groups7 Under what circumstances do the supraordinate groups recognize conflicts between themselves and the subordinate groups7 What are the rights granted to and withheld from outsiders7

How do people in the culture discover their rights when they are outsiders in another culture?

What new social groups are emerging that might challenge the rights of existing groups?

What are the contradictions between the ideological propositions of supraordinate and subordinate groups?

What institutions define and maintain these codes of conduct?

What sanctions are applied to a transgression of human rights propositions?

Answering these and related questions may, at long last, offer a theoretical foundation for an anthropology of human rights. If the answers are expressed in a way that non anthropologists will understand, then an anthropology of human rights might become valuable to those struggling for their human rights and those of others.

An additional problem consists of developing explanations of how and why human rights ideologies change. If the objective is to anticipate changes in the human rights situation of a social group, then a theory that explains ideological change is absolutely necessary. We already have the shreds and patches of such a theory in Wallace's (1961:143-156) theory of revitalization movements, but more work is necessary. This work requires the analyst to step outside an overly narrow preoccupation with ideology and look at the historically specific conditions that might account for these ideologies.

My own preference for a deeper explanation is to be found in the dominant economic trends of an age and peoples, specifically in a theory that considers the importance of the internationalization of capital, the proletarization of labor, the commodification of human social activity and the importance of the laws of capital accumulation (Downing 1982). 1 anticipate that a theory of human rights may turn out to be an insightful chapter in a theory of cultural and economic evolution. But other entry points are possible. Whatever framework is chosen, a grasp of the economic processes underlying changes in ideological logics is imperative.

Once the preceding tasks are properly done, one further problem awaits us: projecting or anticipating human rights issues that will have an impact on the groups that we study. Attempting such work may be beyond the grasp of contemporary social theory. It is neither a trivial methodological nor ethical problem, since as anthropologists approach the answers, their own powerful ideological biases will be more fully understood.

Notes

1. This paper is published in Human Rights and Anthropology, Edited by Theodore E. Downing and Gilbert Kushner. 1988. Cambridge, Mass. Cultural Survival Inc. pp. 9-19. The article was based upon the keynote address presented at the Annual Meeting of the High Plains Regional Section of the Society for Applied Anthropology, February 18, 1984, parts of which were subsequently published in conference proceedings in the Fall 1985 issue of the High Plains Applied Anthropologist (HPAA) 5(3):I-7. 1 wish to express my most sincere appreciation to Carmen Dolney, Rex Hutchens, Sue-Ellen Jacobs, Yuri Downing and the editor of HPAA, Larry Van Horne, for their comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

2. In the discussion that follows I do not consider specific, individual transgressions that create particular human rights problems. My concern is to place the issue of human rights within an anthropological frame of reference. I forewarn that anthropology focuses not on individual behavior, but rather on understanding the structure within which such behavior occurs.

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