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Introduction: Universal Human Rights versus Cultural Relativity

UNIVERSAL HUMAN RIGHTS was one of the earliest global discourses, emerging in the wake of the Nazi Holocaust and first encoded in The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). The UDHR was endorsed by all member states of the United Nations in 1948, and all states explicitly recognize its principles as "the common standard of decency." Basic to the idea of human rights and implicit in all other human rights documents since 1948 is the principle that individuals and (arguably) subordinate groups need to be defended against the more powerful, especially the more powerful state. Thus the provisions of the UDHR, which, among other things, prohibit orture, slavery, and murder and guarantee freedom of conscience, speech, and dissent (all individual rights enjoyed in the public sphere), have entered into international law through a number of treaties and covenants that Messer describes in her contribution to this volume. These rights are widely regarded as immediately enforceable (actual practice notwithstanding). Others, such as self-determination, development, and autonomy, which are collective rights, and economic and social rights such as food, health care, shelter, and gender equality, are more controversial, especially in terms of the obligations of the "nation-state" to protect and enforce them. It is incontrovertible that the discourse of universal human rights, as well as MTV, CNN, just-in-time production, and the Internet revolution, have eroded, in some respects, the edges of the strictly bounded "nation-state." To many, the world seems smaller and more homogeneous as it takes on global dimensions. For its part, anthropology is much concerned with the fate of local identities, local culture, and local ways of understanding the world in the face of accelerating globalization (Appadurai 1996; Featherstone 1990; Lavie and Swedenburg 1996; Rouse 1991). One possible consequence is that the homogenizing effects of global capital and consumerism will erase cultural specificity. Some theorists deplore this and condemn the export of "Western" ideas and practices as a form of cultural imperialism (cf. Friedman 1994). Others argue that globalization is not the same as Westernization and note that it has also generated assertions of local and regional identity (Appadurai 1996; Kearney 1991). Globalization, in other words, is not necessarily bringing about cultural homogenization but, rather, is sparking increasing differentiation and