Socio-economic rights and anthropology? The case of Deaf people who use South African Sign Language (SASL) in a university setting

As a response to Van der Waal and Ward's (2006) invitation, this article suggests human rights, particularly socio-economic rights, as a conceptual framework to take forward anthropology in post-apartheid South Africa. Entrenchment of human rights in South Africa's Constitution marks a break with the country's past. South Africa's Constitution is relatively unique in its comprehensive inclusion of socio-economic rights as enforceable rights. The article draws on the unexpected consequences of a postdoctoral fellowship in public health and human rights. These consequences, based on participant observation in a university setting, supply the ethnography for the article. The ethnography traces the process that saw Deaf people who use signed language enter a university department as research assistants on a rights-based project, and thereafter transform the social relationships and day-to-day interactions of the hearing people around them. The reasons provided for the integration of the Deaf into the university include a 'signing space', a Deaf strategy (described earlier in Heap 2003), a supportive staff and a commitment to and teaching of human rights. On the basis of the ethnography, I suggest that socio-economic rights as a conceptual framework allows the debates in anthropology and human rights to take an additional social dimension. This additional social dimension allows the anthropologist to work for socio-economic rights, and in doing so, combine social activism and anthropology. Then the social activism itself becomes the means to the ethnography and the exploration of the often-unpredictable social life of rights (Wilson and Mitchell 2003).