Cultures, Rights and Religions - direitos e humanos



Cultures, Rights and Religions. Small contributions from ethnography to great anthropological challenges.

Maria Cardeira da Silva

CRIA (Center for Research in Anthropology, Lisbon)

Dep. Anthropology FCSH-UNL (New University, Lisbon)

The title of my paper may seem a very academic one. Given my training, part of it will in fact reflect the anthropologists’ debate about universalism versus cultural relativism. But my aim is to demonstrate - by means of fragments of intense cultural dialogues, for instance those between “Western thought” and Islam - how concomitance, contingency and context (three things ethnography won’t forego), are more useful to focus on than culture or religion per se, when we intend to frame answers to the challenging questions arising from the implementation of Human Rights. To do this, and in pursuit of reachable objectivity, I will ask for a moment of moral suspension insofar as that is possible.

One of my students – who has a nose piercing – is to go soon to Mauritania to study emerging NGOs of young people in that country. She told me that she was worried because another young anthropologist, who was already working there, had warned her that it might not be a good idea for her to walk around the streets of Nouakchott with a nose piercing. I said that I thought it wasn’t just anthropologists who had developed the capacity to accept differences and subsequently she had to come to her own decision about whether to keep the piercing or not and base it only on her previous knowledge of Mauritania society and the principle of mutual gracious hospitality: if she thought that, by taking it off, she would inflict greater symbolic violence on herself than keeping it-on would inflict on her hosts in Mauritania, then she should keep it. If not, she should take it off. As we all know, liberty has its limits and choices have to be made. This seems a universal principle to me. The problem is - as we also know - that the extent of these limits and choices are not universal.

Mauritania is one of the Islamic countries that observe a ritual that most infringes on the application of Human Rights: female genital mutilation. I’ve never carried out ethnographic research on this practice. But the same young anthropologist, who had warned his colleague about the risks of a nose piercing, had met many modern – and this can only mean contemporary - Mauritanian girls outside his work-related activities. He told me in confidence (which I hope not to betray here) that these girls said that the genital cut was part of the configuration of their femininity and their sexuality, just as circumcision was part of the construction of masculinity of their men. This is young people’s talk and I don’t intend to pry. Let us just keep in mind on a positive note that it seemed a friendly, intimate conversation despite the differences. But to do so, we should place it alongside another that is symmetrical to it and negative: I’ve also met Mauritanian Human Rights activists who were often consulted by European committee members seeking grounds to provide asylum for women trying to escape what they considered a brutal ritual.

These reports and overlapping discussions occurred practically at the same time as I was invited to attend this conference. This was also when the International Day of Zero Tolerance against Female Genital Mutilation was being promoted and when the Portuguese Socialist Party put forward a bill - or project law - banning mouth piercing and any others close to veins, nerves and muscles. This legislation also foresaw the prohibition of permanent tattoos and any kind of body piercing for minors without parental consent.

I’m obviously not doing ethnography here – ethnography is a far more thorough, thick and refined method that anthropology has been developing for over a hundred years of the discipline. But it seems to me that the mere presentation of these facts while evoking their concomitance, contingency and context (things ethnography will not give up) forces us to the first necessary shift of perspective for a deep reflection on the Rights we wish were universal. One that will put into perspective, from bottom to top, its application in situations that are shaped by numerous variables besides culture and religion.

Both events – Day of Zero Tolerance against Female Genital Mutilation and the Portuguese Socialist Party’s pledge to stop permanent tattoos and body piercings of minors – got media attention. The first was neither commented on nor contested by Portuguese public opinion. The second event drew heated criticism for the Portuguese government’s meddling in individual freedoms. Yet both cases involved, or at least included if we take into account genital piercings, forms of mutilation as typified by the United Nations and the World Health Organisation that could eventually be inflicted on children (Type V).

It’s awkward and tricky – unless as a private citizen - to talk about such extreme matters that have no easy answers. But it is our duty as scientists not to have taboos. What is revealed objectively in this situation is that similar practices are seen from different perspectives by the Portuguese public opinion, together with that of the medical profession, depending on whether they understood them or not to be “cultural” acts. “Ours” are not seen to be “cultural”. Tattoos and body piercings are not seen as cultural (even when genital). On the other hand, “genital mutilations” come with the culture, if not with the religion itself. This viewpoint stems from a culturalised vision of the world that empties the “other cultures” of individuals. People make our culture. Other cultures make their people.

This is very obvious – also because, despite everything else, it’s less dramatic and draconian – when we speak about the veil, or rather, the veils that some Muslim women wear. Let me tell you how anthropology looks on the phenomenon.

At first and until the mid-1970s, the prevalent character of attitudes towards veiling was in line with feminist discourse. This saw veiling in an essentialist manner as a form of male domination in a patriarchal culture.

Then in a second phase, when people began to talk about culture as a form of resistance in the late 1980s and in the 90s, they discovered that the veil was often a symbol of gender identity assertion: it was a statement with regard to Muslim men rather than with regard to us non-Muslim as we always think in our ethnocentric manner. The veil subsequently emerged as a possible form of resistance. It was at that time that people also discovered that there could be different types of feminism other than the rationalist Western one. From this standpoint, feminism within evangelical Christian framework was also examined.

New ethnographies nowadays, such as the one written by Saba Mahmood, that look at veiling and Muslim pietist attitudes in Egypt, go even further than that: they show how some women, by adhering to Islamic practices and discussion groups, are merely seeking paths and orientations to become “better people” in their own terms. They search for a virtuous self by means of the embodiment of cultural, but also social items in a process of moral self-cultivation. Veiling can be a disciplinary practice that constitutes devout subjectivities. However difficult it is for us, if we want to understand its meaning, we have to be able to look on it from a perspective beyond the resistance/subordination binary.

In anthropology, the locus for observing veiling has moved from religion and culture to gender (women) and then to focus finally on the idea of person. The emphasis of approach has gone from domination to resistance and then to focus finally on the subjective construction of the concept of person which, among many other things (social class, country, life story…), is also culturally and religiously shaped. This shows that veiling does not always imply struggle, or resistance, in order to achieve freedom, though we may possibly like it to do so.

I can say that during my own fieldwork it was only in one country, one town and in some cases one woman that I came across these kinds of veilings (when not linked with others involving models of femininity, local marriage markets and conjugality).

It could be said, and should be said, that veiling in a non-Muslim majority context, like in Europe, has other features as well and gives rise to other kinds of problem. But if we begin to look at it with the same attitude as Saba Mahmood in Egypt – and see it first as a way of dress that might show women desire to become a better person and is consistent with this quest - we dispel at least the immediate fear it inspires if we think that these women wear the veil against us. Fear – when generated from ethnocentres– is the worst of all cultural traps.

This perspective forces us also to withdraw from that culturalised map of the world that sees other cultures without people and our people without “culture”. As Bruno Latour said angrily but also to a certain extent rightly about the prohibition to wear the veil in France: “Entre le voile et le code vestimentaire, faut-il vraiment choisir? Si l'on décide de s'attaquer pour de bon au sexisme, n'est-ce pas toute la politique des corps qui demande à être dévoilée? (...)”.

“Our” people also make use of what is called culture and/or religion in order to find ways to become better people. “Our women” have embodied habitus as well: they go to mass (wearing a veil until recently), they don’t eat meat on Good Friday, they go to the gym, dye their hair, go on diets, have cosmetic liftings and botox injections (when not genital plastic surgery). The church would also like to meddle in our most private personal practices. However, we don’t define ourselves as persons merely by – or in opposition to - our culture or religion.

And now for those who have been hoping to find more strategy and less reflection in my words, I would say that typifying the veil as a mere cultural and/or religious indicator is to increase the political arsenal. It is to wrap up in political paper and throw back something that may well not possess that dimension and reach in the first place.

The relationship between anthropology and human rights has never been peaceful or consensual. How could it, in fact, when it clearly entails a political position? In 1947 the American Anthropological Associated submitted the following statement: “Only when a statement of the right of men to live in terms of their own traditions is incorporated in the proposed Declaration, then, can the next step of defining the rights and duties of human groups as regards to each other be set upon the firm foundation of the present-day scientific knowledge of Man.”

But this position, which emphasizes cultural relativism was never unanimous. And thirty years later, a as culture began to gain more political clout and economic value, anthropologists, who always monitored its uses, were the first to distrust it.

Misgivings on the part of many anthropologists were intensified by the “culture talk” of the «clash of civilisations» t which had begun during the post-cold war era and increased after September 11th alongside with similar misuses of culture and religion by all sorts of fundamentalisms.

It was within this framework that Leila Abu-Lughod wrote an article in 1991 whose title Writing against Culture is more iconoclastic than its contents. Warning that the fact of asserting differences – whatever they may be – opens the door to asymmetrical power, she suggests an emergency kit to guard against the misuse of culture. She includes 1) firstly the need to highlight more and more what she calls “connections”: emphasise what is common, what is shared, what lives side by side together, with a view to narrowing the differences and softening the borders of cultures that are highlighted in culturalist discourses. (This is the challenge that we are, in a way, accepting without taboos, when we dare to place side-by-side practices that we consider to be so far apart, such as, “genital piercing” and “female genital mutilation”; 2)secondly, the need to show the differences between theory and practice: paying attention to what people do, which is not always what they say nor what they say they do;

3) and thirdly, the need to produce and multiply in number ethnographies of the particular: contextualised portraits of the way culture and religion, as well as gender and age, are experienced together with other markers of identify such as class, nation, etc. Ethnographies of the particular may serve as anthropological weapons to combat all and any cultural essentialism or fundamentalism.

Strategically speaking, I would have no problem in placing myself in line with this tactical humanism (as Leila Abu-Lughod calls it): an humanism in which humanity is understood as “sociality” and “co-presence” and which therefore should have its inspection more focused on the level of social and political relations than on its cultural manifestations.

For a reflection explicitly aimed at informing contextualised implementation of Human Rights, I would add to her kit some insights that ethnography always avails itself of to focus on issues;

1) concomitance – to view others and ourselves concomitantly in their and our cultural acts;

2) contingency – search for what may circumstantially spark off, or re-enact, certain cultural traits instead of looking at culture (or religion) in a static way as an explanation for man’s acts;

3) context – not to let culture (or religion) conceal the social, political and economical context, local and global, in which a specific act is produced and interpreted.

So, do I speak against anthropology when I say that cultural relativism needs to be relativised?

No. I’m saying that anthropology, particularly ethnography, is very useful precisely in order to monitor the uses and abuses of culture – “here” and “there”, or rather, everywhere.

I’m saying that ethnography - from being a necessary method to confirm cultural relativism - has become necessary to objectify relations between universal principles stemming from international organisations such as the United Nations and its application and applicability in specific cultural and social contexts. These organisation and principles are also cultural and can subsequently be approached ethnographically as well.

I’m saying that this edifice itself – wich has the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as its touchstone, and is supported by its numerous conventions and committees, its relations with states and NGOs, its doxa and own language - is also one of the most important twentieth-century cultural constructions. And that one of its more recent canons, the importance of creative diversity, however well-intentioned, brings to this edifice all the tension that has existed these last few centuries in the West with its relations with the Rest.

Seeing that anthropology sprang from that tension, it’s only natural that it’s well equipped to observe it, in the same way that it has a trained eye for other cultural facts.

It’s true that the kind of knowledge anthropology offers – and the ethnography it proposes as a prior condition to any sustainable and contextualized policy– can be awkward for some. A certain pragmatism is required to solve problems that are also social and individual and subsequently have little sympathy with its line of argument, especially when we look at them case by case.

Ethnography may not be well equipped to give urgent and global answers, but it is clearly indispensable in order to foresee the side effects of bad answers. It’s a modest and thankless task. But in the midst of so much noisy “culture talk”, it is gaining some importance.

MAHMOOD Saba, 2005. Politics of Piety, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

ABU-LUGHOD, Lila, 1991 “Writing against Culture”. In Recapturing Anthropology:

Working in the Present. Ed. Richard Fox. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, pp. 137-62.

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