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
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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.
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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
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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 nonMuslim as we always think in our ethnocentric manner.
subsequently emerged as a possible form of resistance.
The veil
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
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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.
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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
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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;
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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 reenact, 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?
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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
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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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