Human Rights and Cultural Rights - An Anthropological Critique

The paper starts by examining some of the key conceptual problems related to the idea of human rights, as well as some key arguments raised in defence of human rights as universal and emacipatory modern project. This is followed by a discussion on cultural rights, sometimes understood as a correction of human rights' universalism, at other times taken as their "logical extension"; it will be shown how human rights have gradually begun to be amalgamated with cultural and collective rights. The third section of the paper continues with an overview of anthropological critique of cultural (and collective) rights, with an emphasis on ethnographies critically examining the domination of the "rights talk" in perceptions and self-perceptions of various local "cultural" struggles. Finally, the issue of the universality of human rights is reexamined from the perspective of the particularity of citizens' rights with the aim of questioning the validity of their conceptual demarcation.