2 different hws. one is 8 sentences the other is 400 words

May 2003 Page 55

Sally Engle Merry
Wellesley College

Human Rights and the Demonization of Culture
(And Anthropology Along the Way)

A few weeks ago, I received a phone call from a prominent radio show asking if
I would be willing to talk about the recent incident in Pakistan that resulted in the
gang rape of a young woman, an assault apparently authorized by a local tribal
council. Since I am working on human rights and violence against women, I was
happy to explain my position that this was an inexcusable act, that many
Pakistani feminists condemned the rape, but that it was probably connected to
local political struggles and should not be seen as an expression of Pakistani
“culture.” In fact, it was the local Islamic religious leader who first made the
incident known to the world, according to news stories I had read. The inter-
viewer was distressed. She wanted me to defend the value of respecting Pakistani
culture at all costs, despite the sentence of rape. When I told her that I could not
do that, she wanted to know if I knew of any other anthropologists who would. I
could think of none, but I began to wonder what she thought about anthropolo-
gists. Anthropologists, apparently, made no moral judgments about “cultures”
and failed to recognize the contestation and changes taking place within con-
temporary local communities around the world. This also led me to wonder how
she imagined anthropologists thought about culture. She seemed to assume that
anthropologists viewed culture as a coherent, static, and unchanging set of val-
ues. Apparently cultures have no contact with the expansion of capitalism, the
arming of various groups by transnational superpowers using them for proxy
wars, or the cultural possibilities of human rights as an emancipatory discourse.
I found this interviewer’s view of culture wrong-headed and her opinion of
anthropology discouraging.

But perhaps it was just one radio interviewer, I thought. However, a recent arti-
cle in Human Rights Quarterly paints another odd portrait of anthropology and
its understanding of culture. In this piece, Karen Engle, a law professor, talks
about the continuing “embarrassment” of anthropologists about the 1947 state-
ment of the Executive Board of the American Anthropological Association which
raised concerns about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (2001:536).
Engle claims that the statement has caused the AAA “great shame” over the last
fifty years (2001:542). Anthropologists are embarrassed, she argues, because the
statement asserted tolerance without limits. While many anthropologists now
embrace human rights, they do so primarily in terms of the protection of culture.
She argues that the tensions that the 1947 Board confronted—over how to be a
cultural relativist and still make overt political judgments—remain. She
acknowledges that not all anthropologists think about culture this way, but sug-

Copyright €> 2003, American Anthropological Association

Page 56 PoLAR: Vol. 26, No. 1

gests that many do, including those who produced the AAA statement.
Relativism, as she describes it, is primarily about tolerance for differences and is
incompatible with making any moral judgments about other societies.

But I think this incompatibility depends on how one theorizes culture. Thinking
about culture as a homogeneous, integrated, and consensual system means that it
must be accepted or criticized as a whole. This article describes a more complex
way of understanding culture, developed within anthropology, that changes the
terms of the relativism/universalism debate.

The Relativist Critique and the Critique of Relativism

The Executive Board of the American Anthropological Association prepared a
statement opposing the proposed Universal Declaration of Human Rights and
submitted it to the UN Commission on Human Rights in 1947 (1947:539-543).
Written by leading members of the AAA, the statement saw the UDHR as a new
form of imperialism. The authors asked, “How can the proposed Declaration be
applicable to all human beings, and not be a statement of rights conceived only
in terms of the values prevalent in the countries of Western Europe and
America?” (1947:539). It argues that ideas such as the “white man’s burden”
have justified controlling the affairs of millions of people all over the world and
that “the history of the expansion of the western world has been marked by
demoralization of human personality and the disintegration of human rights
among the peoples over whom hegemony has been established” (1947:541). The
statement was very much a defense of small, beleaguered communities made in
the name of freedom, raised to the level of a universal value. It argued that “man
is free only when he lives as his society defines freedom” (1947:543). Thus, the
Statement articulated the value of tolerance for difference and a critique of eth-
nocentrism along with the values of freedom and choice, values expressed in the
UDHR. It is an assertion of moral values that includes tolerance for cultural dif-
ference as one of those values, not a denial of the ability to make moral judg-
ments at all.

As Alison Renteln points out, the relativism of the statement is more about encul-
turation than about tolerance (1988). It argues that the value systems of a socie-
ty are adopted by their members through a process of learning and socialization
(1988:62). The statement did not say anything goes, only that individuals
become committed to their values through belonging to a social group and there-
fore cannot be judged by other standards. Her interpretation of relativism differs
from Engle’s reading of tolerance without limits.

Not all anthropologists agreed with the statement at the time. Julian Steward and
H. G. Barnett objected not because they were appalled at tolerance without lim-
its but were unhappy about the political nature of the statement for a value-free
science like anthropology (Steward 1948:351). But the major difference among
the anthropologists who wrote the statement and those who debated it concerned

May 2003 Page 57

what kind of society they were discussing. Those behind this statement, such as
Melville Herskovitz, had studied small communities in colonized regions, such
as Africa and the Caribbean. They saw in the human rights approach a replay of
earlier imperial efforts at transformation. The statement and its theory of cultur-
al relativism referred to societies experiencing pressures to change under the
influence of Euro-American expansion and colonialism (see Herskovitz 1972).
In outlining his theory, Herskovitz draws on examples of villages in Africa while
earlier Boasians tended to do research among small communities of Native
Americans. Thus, the empirical ground for the relativist position was the colo-
nized peoples in Africa and the United States.

Critics of the statement challenged its appropriateness for “civilized” nations. As
Julian Steward pointed out, “If the plea that cultural values be respected means
merely that the primitive peoples, who are on the receiving end of civilizing
influences, be treated with greater understanding and tolerance, there can be lit-
tle objection to it” (1948:351). But, he continues, does that mean we approve of
the social caste system of India or the racial caste system of the United States?
Or that we approve of the exploitation of primitive peoples through Euro-
American economic imperialism? When the anthropological gaze shifted to
modern states, there was clearly much to condemn. Indeed, anthropologists such
as Franz Boas, Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead working in the same tradition
were quite ready to criticize their own society.

Tolerance for Nazi Germany was a particularly sticky point at the time. The state-
ment itself obliquely alluded to this problem by claiming that in states that deny
citizens the right of participation in their governments or seek to conquer weak-
er peoples, underlying cultural values may provide a brake on these activities.
This does not resolve the problem of where the boundary should be drawn
between tolerance and places where it is necessary to fight intolerance, but it
does show that there was a clear recognition among anthropologists in the 1940s
that tolerance for cultural difference could not be asserted to the exclusion of all
other ethical concerns. The critical point is this: the anthropological position was
not the defense of all cultural practices but a more nuanced recognition that tol-
erance of difference was one of several important ethical considerations, as well
as one under siege at that historical moment. Indeed, the statement’s cultural rel-
ativism is based on an ethical assertion of both freedom and respect for cultural
difference.

Why does Engle describe the anthropological reaction to this statement as one of
enduring embarrassment? Surely, there is a legitimate basis for these concerns.
Contemporary anthropology continues to be concerned about the desire of exter-
nal reform movements, whether generated by colonialism, globalization, or
human rights reformers, to change cultural practices without sufficient respect
for difference. This was a reasonable worry in 1947, still a deeply colonial era,
as it is today under the pressures of globalizing capitalism. These political con-

Page 58 PoLAR: Vol. 26, No. 1

cerns are not a source of embarrassment to anthropology then or now. Nor, it
seems, was the statement ever intended to say that all cultural differences must
be tolerated, but that tolerance is a value along with others such as freedom.

Is anthropology being caricatured in these portrayals? There seems to be a mis-
understanding in some parts of the media and the law about anthropology’s
emphasis on the importance of tolerance for cultural difference. I think that the
misunderstanding grows out of erroneous ideas about the concept of culture
itself. If culture is thought of as a reified thing, as bounded and static, then cul-
tural relativism means defending every practice and every belief at all costs. But
this is not the way contemporary anthropologists think about culture. Indeed,
Engle concludes that if anthropology saw culture as contested, hybridized, and
dynamic, its difficulties with relativism would diminish. But, she argues that rel-
ativism remains entrenched in the AAA and concepts of hybridity and creoliza-
tion have not entered the discourse of the AAA Committee on Human Rights
(2001:559).

Portrayals of Culture in Human Rights Documents on Women’s Rights

Conceptions of culture as static tradition are fundamental to contemporary trans-
national human rights discourse. Political movements such as the fight against
female genital cutting/mutilation or FGM reinforce this notion of culture. This
practice has mobilized enormous attention and concern in the global North as
well as in parts of Africa. The North movement has capitalized on old and well-
established tropes of traditional culture, as well as on conceptions of African sav-
agery and Islamic anti-woman ideology. In addition, it offers a titillating oppor-
tunity to imagine African women’s genitalia. While I certainly do not deny the
physical pain and suffering this practice entails nor its role in the highly gendered
ways women’s sexuality is restricted and women’s subordination ensured, I want
to note the global preoccupation with this practice at the expense of many oth-
ers. Unequal access to education and jobs, to clean water and adequate food, and
to divorce and equal inheritance also burden African women. The struggle
against FGM has been conceptualized as one against culture, or more specifical-
ly, against harmful traditional cultural practices. It has merged with critiques of
dowry death in India, although this is quite a different situation since dowry
killings are not an accepted cultural practice but offenses prohibited by law that
occur after dowry agreements have broken down. Critiques of these region-spe-
cific anti-woman practices become part of a more general critique of cultural
practices that harm women, while cultural practices that protect women receive
far less attention. However, some legal scholars take a far more nuanced and
thoughtful approach to understanding culture, such as Abdullahi An Na’im (e.g.,
1990; 1992). An Na’im seeks to integrate human rights and local cultural under-
standings rather than seeing them as oppositional.

May 2003 Page 59

But this perspective is exceptional in human rights discourse. Over the last two
and a half years, I have been doing ethnographic research on the international
human rights system and its approach to violence against women. This entails
going to world conferences such as Beijing Plus Five, to the annual meetings of
two UN Commissions, the Commission on the Status of Women and the Human
Rights Commission, and attending the twice-yearly meetings of the committee
that monitors the major women’s convention, the Convention on the Elimination
of all Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW). I have talked at length
to members of these bodies, to the experts on the CEDAW committee, to NGO
activists who attend, and to government and NGO leaders in several Asia/Pacific
countries about whether these UN documents and discussions matter to them and
how they matter. I have read the major documents and observed the production
of new documents.

Some of these documents, such as CEDAW, are legally binding conventions rat-
ified by individual countries, while others are policy documents to which signa-
tory governments commit themselves in principle, such as the outcome state-
ments of the Beijing Fourth World Conference on Women in 1995 and the
Vienna Declaration of 1993. The CEDAW committee hears reports presented by
the 170 countries that have ratified the convention and asks questions of govern-
ment representatives concerning the extent of ratification, so that CEDAW hear-
ings provide insight into both government perspectives and those of the global
experts who make up the committee (see Merry 2003).

Overall, this is a very legalistic domain of activity. Although the NGOs bring a
far more socially aware approach to problems such as women’s inferior status
than human rights lawyers do, much of the work of producing and refining doc-
uments has a very lawyerly quality to it (see Riles 2000). During sessions of doc-
ument production, whether in global meetings such as Beijing Plus Five, techni-
cally a special session of the UN General Assembly, or in meetings to draft res-
olutions at the Human Rights Commission (HRC) or the Commission on the
Status of Women (CSW), representatives of the concerned nations, speaking as
nations, propose language for the documents. For example, the chair of such ses-
sions will call on someone as “Malaysia” or “India.” The proposed language is
rarely accompanied by any justification for the change or any data that might
address the issue under discussion. Instead, the process is one of reaching
“agreed language” through compromises among various interest groups, consti-
tuted by groupings of countries that have a basically regional as well as economic
flavor. For example, one of the groups is referred to as JUSCANZ and includes
Japan, the U.S., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Another is the Group of 77
plus China that incorporates well over 77 developing nations as well as China.
Sentences and paragraphs for which there are competing versions are placed in
brackets, listed according to the group of nations that has proposed each version.

Page 60 PoLAR: Vol. 26, No. 1

Document production consists of finding compromises among the alternative
versions listed. In this situation, reverting to the language of an earlier document,
on which consensus has already been achieved, provides a solution to intractable
differences. Textual struggles occur around issues such as whether sexual orien-
tation should be listed as one basis for discrimination against women or whether
the effects of globalization and structural adjustment should be mentioned as a
source of hardship for women. On the one hand, this process leads to bland and
relatively convoluted texts, but on the other hand it is quite remarkable that rep-
resentatives from countries all over the world are working to collaboratively pro-
duce a unified document concerning such contentious subjects as torture or the
position of women (see Riles 2000). Many of the debates about language involve
significant substantive differences about issues such as the causes of poverty or
the acceptability of same-sex relationships.

The documents generated at global conferences, from Commission meetings, as
well as those from the CEDAW hearings and the general recommendations the
CEDAW committee writes typically talk about culture as a barrier to progress.
Culture is often equated to customs, traditions, and ancient practices. Documents
concerning women are particularly likely to describe culture in these terms.
When nationalist and religious fundamentalist leaders resist women’s rights in
the name of culture, they foster this critical stance toward culture by those who
promote women’s equality. At the same time, the critique of culture builds on
imperial understandings of culture as belonging to the domain of the primitive or
backward, in contrast to the civilization of the colonizer. Residues of this under-
standing of culture emerge in contemporary human rights law.

Many human rights documents, such as CEDAW, see culture as an obstacle to
the human rights of women. The portrayal of culture as an obstacle to women’s
rights has been increasing over time. The text of CEDAW was completed in
1979. Its Article 5 on Sex Roles and Stereotyping calls on states parties to take
all appropriate measures:

a) To modify the social and cultural patterns of conduct of men and
women, with a view to achieving the elimination of prejudices and
customary and all other practices which are based on the idea of the
inferiority or the superiority of either of the sexes or on stereotyped
roles for men and women. [CEDAW 1981]

In this and many other documents concerning women’s human rights, the
demands for cultural change are unambiguous.

Moreover, policy documents and conventions frequently assert that customs or
practices should not be used to deny women their rights. The Declaration on the
Elimination of Violence against Women adopted unanimously by the General
Assembly of the United Nations in 1993 takes this position. Although it has no
binding force, this Declaration does have the moral force of world consensus

May 2003 Page 61

(Coomaraswamy and Kios 1999:182). The Declaration is a comprehensive doc-
ument which defines violence against women broadly to include physical, sexu-
al, and psychological harm or threats of harm in public or private life (Article 1).
It prohibits invoking custom, tradition, or religious considerations to avoid its
obligations and urges states to exercise “due diligence” to prevent, investigate,
and punish acts of violence against women whether perpetrated by the state or
private persons (Article 4; Van Bueren 1995:753). The concept of culture is not
discussed or developed, but seems to be the equivalent of traditions, customs,
and religion.

Similarly, the 1993 Vienna Declaration stressed the importance of “the eradication
of any conflicts which may arise between the rights of women and the harmful
effects of certain traditional or customary practices, cultural prejudices and reli-
gious extremism” (Vienna 1993:19). This paragraph does not explicitly condemn
such customs and practices, however. The 1995 Platform for Action from the
Beijing Fourth World Conference on Women takes a stronger stand. It states:

Violence against women throughout the life cycle derives essential-
ly from cultural patterns, in particular the harmful effects of certain
traditional or customary practices and all acts of extremism linked
to race, sex, language or religion that perpetuate the lower status
accorded to women in the family, the workplace, the community and
society. [Beijing 1996:118]

According to Strategic Objective D.I, governments should: “Condemn violence
against women and refrain from invoking any custom, tradition or religious con-
sideration to avoid their obligations with respect to its elimination as set out in the
Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women” (Beijing
1995:124(a)). By urging governments to refrain from invoking culture, the
Platform goes beyond the 1993 document that asks governments to reconcile con-
flicts between rights and culture.

The CEDAW committee has produced 24 general recommendations since 1986
to expand and interpret the meanings of the Convention itself. These recommen-
dations are not legally binding but are part of the jurisprudence of the Con-
vention. The commentaries they provide frequently describe culture as a barrier
to women’s equality and the enjoyment of rights. General Recommendation 21
from 1994, for example, discusses marriage and the family. Article 3 asserts that
CEDAW recognizes the inalienable rights of women but goes further than other
conventions “by recognizing the importance of culture and tradition in shaping
the thinking and behaviour of men and women and the significant part they play
in restricting the exercise of basic rights by women” (United Nations Human
Rights Website 1994). With reference to Article 16 on the family, the commen-
tary argues that polygamy is practiced in many countries and that this contra-
venes a woman’s right to equality with men. “The Committee notes with concern

Page 62 PoLAR: Vol. 26, No. 1

that some States parties, whose constitutions guarantee equal rights, permit
polygamous marriage in accordance with personal or customary laws. This vio-
lates the constitutional rights of women, and breaches the provisions of article
5(a) of the Convention” (General Recommendation 21, Article 16, Commentary
14). Here customary laws are described as responsible for the persistence of
polygamy.

With reference to the reservations some countries lodge against basic parts of the
convention, such as Article 2 which asserts non-discrimination as a principle and
Article 16 which applies this principle to the family, the commentary again locates
the obstacles in a mix of religious fundamentalism, tradition, and economic hard-
ships while citing modernity as the force which counters this tendency:

42. Many of these countries [with reservations] hold a belief in the
patriarchal structure of a family which places a father, husband, or
son in a favourable position. In some countries where fundamen-
talist or other extremist views or economic hardships have encour-
aged a return to old values and traditions, women’s place in the
family has deteriorated sharply. In others, where it has been recog-
nized that a modern society depends for its economic advance and
for the general good of the community on involving all adults
equally, regardless of gender, these taboos and reactionary or
extremist ideas have progressively been discouraged. [General
Recommendation 21, Commentary on Reservations, point 42]

While there is no doubt that cultural demands for women’s subordination have
been made in the name of nationalism or religious fundamentalism, this text
locates the source of oppression for women largely in the domain of beliefs and
values. Thus, it reinforces the idea that it is culture that is subordinating women
and modernity that frees them. That modernity is also a cultural system seems
lost in this formulation. Culture is relegated to the domain of the past, to religious
extremism, and to irrational “taboos.” Its opposite is modernity and the norms of
human rights.

The CEDAW committee takes a similar stance toward women’s political partic-
ipation. In General Recommendation 23, from 1997, the commentary on Article
7 on political and public life states:

10. In all nations, the most significant factors inhibiting women’s
ability to participate in public life have been the cultural frame-
works of values and religious beliefs, the lack of services and men’s
failure to share the tasks associated with the organization of the
household and with the care and raising of children. In all nations,
cultural traditions and religious beliefs have played a part in con-
fining women to the private spheres of activity and excluding them

May 2003 Page 63

from active participation in public life. [General Recommendation
23, Comment 10]

While this attribution of cultural factors is undoubtedly accurate, again the
responsibility is located in the domain of beliefs and values to the exclusion of
political, economic, or structural factors.

Another manifestation of the understanding of culture prevalent in human rights
law is the concept of harmful traditional practices. Originally developed to
describe female genital mutilation, this term describes practices that have some
cultural legitimacy yet are designated harmful to women, particularly to their
health. In their discussion of traditional practices harmful to women, Coomara-
swamy and Kios refer to cultural and traditional practices interchangeably
(1999). Customs criticized as harmful traditional practices include sati in India
(the immolation of a widow), female abortion and infanticide as a result of son
preference, child marriage, arranged or forced marriage, polygamy, seclusion and
veiling, and food taboos for women. FGM represents the poster child for harm-
ful traditional practices, the central issue around which the conception of harm-
ful cultural practices or harmful traditional practices has coalesced (see Boyle
2002). In many ways, it defines the concept. It is a form of physical cutting that
is widely seen as having harmful health consequences such as infections, painful
urination and menstruation, difficulties in childbirth, and other complications.
The Sub-Commission on the Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of
Minorities of the Human Rights Commission created a Special Rapporteur on
Traditional Practices Affecting the Health of Women and Children in 1989
(Report of the Special Rapporteur on Traditional Practices affecting the Health of
Women and Children UN Doc E/CN.4/Sub.2/1990/44) and a Working Group on
Traditional Practices as early as 1986 (Bernard 1996:78). In 1990, the CEDAW
Committee, being gravely concerned “that there are continuing cultural, tradi-
tional and economic pressures which help to perpetuate harmful practices, such
as female circumcision,” adopted a general recommendation (number 14) that
suggested that states parties should take measures to eradicate the practice of
female circumcision (Bernard 1996:78). Thus, genital cutting became the type
case of a practice justified by custom and culture and redefined as an act of vio-
lence and a breach of women’s human rights (Bernard 1996:79). In this formula-
tion, culture is the same as tradition and is juxtaposed to women’s human rights
to equality. It is not surprising, given this evolving understanding of culture with-
in human rights discourse, that cultural relativism is seen in such a negative light.

The idea that culture is a problem for human rights, that, for example, it stands
as a barrier to women’s equality, is related to a more general tendency to cultur-
alize problems. This means that it is a way to interpret women’s subordination in
terms of cultural practices that suppress them rather than the economic or polit-
ical problems their communities face (see Nader 1989; Abu-Lughod 2002).
Blaming culture for the disadvantages faced by women, minorities, and other

Page 64 PoLAR: Vol. 26, No. 1

vulnerable groups is an appealing ideology for proponents of contemporary
neoliberal globalization. It blames the havoc wreaked by expansive capitalism
and global conflicts on the culture of the “other.” This absolves the rich countries
of responsibility for the suffering caused by these processes and blames local
people, such as battering husbands, oppressive men who veil their wives, and
knife-wielding fans of FGM, for the suffering. Yet, these practices are not nec-
essarily ancient. Veiling or modest dress may be a contemporary effort to protect
women in the face of the devastation of internal war and proxy wars between
major powers while battering results from both patriarchal family authority and
the political violence and chaos of war. The developed countries have political
and economic incentives to insist on a cultural interpretation of women’s subor-
dination.

At the same time, this cultural theory also relegates societies that oppress women
to an inferior status. When corporate executives in the U.S. steal millions of dol-
lars through accounting fraud, we do not critique American culture as a whole.
We recognize that these actions come from the greed of a few along with sloppy
institutional arrangements that allow them to get away with it. Similarly, the
actions of a single tribal council in Pakistan should not indict the entire country.
Although many communities do have practices and laws that subordinate
women, these are neither homogeneous nor ancient. Pakistan as a “culture” can
be indicted by this council’s encouragement to rape only if culture is understood
as a homogeneous entity whose rules evoke universal compliance.

What do anthropologists mean by culture?

yers and journalists have sometimes misinterpreted anthropology’s position
about relativism and difference because …