Human Rights and Cultural Relativism: The Need for a New Approach

Ronald Cohen

American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 91, No. 4. (Dec., 1989), pp. 1014-1017.

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on 'genuine' Black behavior" (p. 708). In say-
ing this he has approached Rose's work as a
"standard ethnography." Rose's research, if it
could be called research in the traditional
sense, runs against the established grain of ac-
ceptable academic discourse, and largely be-
cause it does, it deserves our serious attention.
In the winter of 1969, Dan Rose took up res-
idence in South Philadelphia, entered into the
employ of a Black man as an automobile me-
chanic, and for two years lived as a local actor
in the Black street life. As a covert researcher,
Rose did not have the status of the anthropol-
ogist, the transcendent vantage point from
which to observe everyday life, nor did he have
the authority to interrupt the everyday life of
people in order to ask questions. T o have
iskid questions, to have engaged in inquiry,
would have created suspicion, especially in a
community where the majority of the people
had some kind of police record. As a local ac-
tor, Rose had to flow with the events; his
knowledge about Black life thus developed at
the same slow pace as the flow of local life.
Rose's book, in his own words, is "a succes-
sion of movements in the longer history of the
self" and represents a chronological unfold-
ing of experience, an extension of the self into
the culture of the other. Rose draws the reader
into his experience as he is gradually appro-
priated by the world of the hustle, the theater
of the street, and the complex and often dan-
gerous relationships in which he becomes
embedded. ~ o s e ' narrative
s is frequently
punctuated by thought-provoking reflec-
tions-theoretical/interpretive asides-on
the character of Black street life as it comes to
be juxtaposed against the popular and intel-
lectual culture of Rose's White middle-class
upbringing. These extended anecdotes flow as
logical outcomes of the narrative, and in turn
enrich the narrative and force the reader to
critically assess the assumptions of his or her
own culture.
What Rose has written presents ethical and
epistemological issues that Williams has cho-
sen not to articulate. First, there is the ethical
issue of covert research. Was Rose right in
what he did? Is it right to pretend not to be an
anthropologist and then to appropriate the
knowledge of another culture-an oppressed
and powerless culture-for academic publi-
cation? The other issue is epistemological.
How do we know what we know? As anthro-
pologists, we enter the field as anomalous and
somewhat privileged persons who are given
the right to inquire into the lives of others. In
return, the "others," knowing more or less
who we are, manage the knowledge they
choose to present us. Granted, we can observe
the "real" or "authentic" behavior of the
other in unpreplanned contexts; nonetheless,
who we are-the privileged stranger and
anomalous friend-is ever present. What we
come to know, in the end, is based on who we
are perceived to be. Dan Rose was not per-
ceived as an anthropologist, and what he came
to know is deeply informing to anthropolo-
gists.
Human Rights and Cultural
Relativism: The Need for a
New Approach
RONALD COHEN
University of Florida
The recent discussions of cultural relativisrri
and of human rights in the pages of this jour-
nal grow out of an old controversy. And as
Washburn (AA 89:939-942, 1987) points out,
Geertz's "Distinguished Lecture: Anti Anti-
Relativism" (1984) resuscitated the debate.
Although readers of this journal would cer-
tainly agree about the moral and logical flaws
in the arguments of the relativists, unfortu-
nately the relevant issues lie elsewhere. An-
thropologists may ignore these problems,
leaving discussion and research to others, or
join in. Meanwhile, the questions being raised
have in effect shifted the emphasis from rela-
tivism as creed and/or epistemology (Geertz
1984; Nissim-Sabat 1987) to a set of more con-
troversial and more immediately practical
considerations. These have to do with the rel-
ative value and validity of contradictory
claims by those from different cultural and
ideological traditions about human rights. At
issue are questions about when and under
what (if any) circumstances contradictory hu-
man rights beliefs and practices are support-
able. Contrarily, when do they run counter to
truly human interests, if such a quality can be
defined; and when, ifat all, or under what con-
ditions can we expect basic research to inform
such questions?
i he sad and interesting feature of this new
concern with the importance, or lack of it, of
cultural relativism is the absence of anthro-
pologists from the discussions. A recent con-
ference on human rights in Africa (Shepherd
1987) has only a limited contribution from an-
thropology. (One anthropologist, B. Harrell-
Bond, is included as junior author ofone of the
papers.) A major book on human rights in Af-
rica with an entire chapter devoted to cultural
relativism (Howard 1986:ch. 2) has been writ-
ten by a sociologist whose work owes much to
the contribution of a political scientist (Don-
nelly 1984, 1985). In her references to cultural
relativism Howard (1986:34-36) cites forty-
five separate scholars, only three of whom
(Bidney 1968; Kopytoff 1977; and Legesse
1980) could be considered anthropological in
their approch to the problem. Spawned by the
researches and methods of anthropology, cul-
tural relativism has become a topic of interest
to the history of the discipline, and possibly to
epistemological controversies (how far can we
succeed in understanding another culture),
but of little relevance to those dealing with hu-
man rights and relativism in the 1980s.
The reasons for this avoidance are not sim-
ply that anthropology is the bad guy of the
comparative social science community-the
studv, of "~rimitive"behavior is bv definition
&
an insult; anthropology is tied up with colo-
nialism; anthropologists highlight practices
that many contemporary Third World peo-
ples feel are uncomplimentary to their image
internationallv. It is rather that much of the
relativism argument, particularly the human
rights domain, has shifted to national and in-
ternational levels of interaction, leaving an-
thropologists in advocacy roles for the welfare
of those they study, or mired in the microlevel
of face-to-face, small-scale social life. What for
instance has anthropological research (not sim-
ply pious pronouncements) to say about the
rights described in the U.N. Charter, or the
African Charter, o r the demand for a new
world order of equitable power over resources
and information by all peoples and nations-
or contradictions among these claims, even
when all such claims are defended as stem-
ming from a common humanity?
Let me be more specific. T h e Universal
Declaration of Human Rights emphasizes the
Western tradition of individual human rights,
which asserts that persons must be protected
against the arbitrary use of power by the state
to limit their freedom of expression, and as-
serts their rights to safety and security of per-
son and ideas (Sieghart 1986). The African
Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights af-
firms t h e "virtues of [ t h e African]
. . . historical tradition and the values of Afri-
can civilization which should inspire and
characterize. . . the concept of human and
peoples' rights" (Sieghart 1986:23 1-237). I n
other words, added to or in contradistinction
to Western traditions of individual human
rights there are both similar and different as-
simptions said to be rooted in the African so-
cial and cultural heritage. This provides the
basis for asserting that the state has an obli-
gation "to ensure the exercise of the right to
development" (African Charter, quoted in
Sieghart 1986:236). And this rests on a theo-
retical premise that collectivities have rights
that vary across cultures, in relation to other
collectivities and to individuals. Conse-
quently, the empowerment of states to accom-
plish goals of human betterment and the pub-
lic good, above and beyond the protection of
the individual, is claimed to be a justifiable
feature of African concepts of human rights,
given the moral validity of relativist perspec-
tives. And by derivation, as long as it can be
argued that the state is carrying out its cultur-
ally defined obligation, thereby its mandate,
to foster development, then there exists a de-
fensible logic for abrogating the rights of in-
dividuals if such actions and expectations are
said to stand in the way. Those defending the
African position argue that the Western-in-
spired and ethnocentric concern for individual
rights leads to institutionalized support for
greed, poverty, and a lack of concern for the
collective and public good (see Bellah et al.
1985, for a discussion of this same point within
the context of U.S. culture). Contrarily, the
African position is attacked as a sophist ra-
tionale for unfettered state power that claims
the right to rule by virtue of good intentions,
and the right to suppress opposition because
of its African cultural heritage (Howard
1986).
Some would go even further and argue that
the right to development means that the ineq-
uities of power in the world between the poor
and the wealthy nations must be set aside.
This "third generation" of human rights (the
first being the individual vs. the state, the sec-
ond being the welfare of people within states)
must be pressed into existence in contradis-
tinction to sovereign rights of nation-states
that stand as barriers to international justice
(Shepherd 1990). Others would argue that
such idealistic outcomes cannot obtain under
real world conditions. And even if redistribu-
tion on a worldwide scale were possible, the
equity demanded would have to be supported
by internal societal processes of transforma-
tion. Otherwise the campaign for interna-
tional justice is a rhetorical sanctuary behind
which Third World elites enrich themselves
while failing to alleviate poverty and injustice
in their own societies.
Which of these "rights" is primary? Which
takes precedence when, as they inevitably
must, they conflict? And what yardstick(s) can
be used to make such judgments? These are
the kinds of issues (among many, including
such matters as gender, freedom of expression,
property, children, religion, health, freedom of
movement, residential freedom, the rule of
 law, and refugees) that inform the contempo-
rary debate over relativism, and that seem to
be missing in the discussion of the concept in
anthropology.
Given the urgency of such issues, it is at best
irrelevant, or worse even mischievous, to as-
sert and defend simplistic polarities of relativ-
ism versus universal moral imperatives. What
is desperately needed-and anthropology
should be central to this quest-is a search for
some middle ground. Possibly African social
theorists have overdone the collective nature
of African cultural traditions and the lack of a
just concern required for non-Western indi-
viduals in the modern nation-state. Possibly
we in the West do in fact overstress the re-
quirements of individual freedom and self-re-
alization at the expense of the public good.
Possibly; but the answer to such questions lies
out in the hurly-burly amid the blooming,
buzzing confusion of real world experience,
where rights or a sense of what is just and fair
emerge, rather than in the philosopher's study
or in the anthropologist's cranky (and some-
times) justifiable urge to advocacy. Without
the crutches of relativism, or the unthinking
arrogance of ethnocentric Kantianism, differ-
ences have to be judged not just as "varia-
tions"-interesting scientifically and morally
defensible, or indefensible. There is today an
obligation to ask as well whether or not such
differences enhance or degrade the lives of
those who hope to survive and flourish under
their sway. And we must search for valid
measuring devices to evaluate and derive
workable solutions to these questions.
Although these issues are difficult enough,
they rest on even more fundamental questions,
again within the purview of anthropology.
There are grounds, theoretically, for hypoth-
esizing that we in the West with our strong de-
fense of individual rights have quite different
characterological and socialization experi-
ences from those in other cultures. I would ar-
gue that the degree to which the self incorpo-
rates (cognitively, emotionally, and morally)
the acts and the fate of related persons into the
organization of personal understanding and
reactions varies significantly across cultures as
a function of threats to personal security and
rewards of the shared fate of group members.
In other words, cultures have evolved institu-
tions and norms to support more and less con-
cern over the rights and obligations of individ-
uals as opposed to those of collectivities. Fur-
thermore, the conditions determining these
outcomes change over time, so that what was
defensible (at least logically, if not morally,
from a universalist point of view) may not be
argued for under conditions of modern life.
And how does this question inform the relativ-
ity of rights today and tomorrow across cul-
tures? Do regimes ruling over cultures that
have downplayed individualism in the past
have the right, on grounds of relativity of val-
ues, character structure, and sentiments, to
stress collective goals at the expense of indi-
vidual rights when these conflict-in a chang-
ing world?
There are no easy answers to such ques-
tions, beyond those of personal beliefs, preju-
dices, and tradition-guided responses. What is
needed is to transform such issues into empir-
ically based research, the very hallmark of our
own anthropological past. It wasn't easy to es-
tablish the decentering (i.e., comparative) ba-
sis of kinship, religion, personality, and the
host of institutions we have shown to have
valid variability among human groups. But
the most difficult task remains. Which among
the relativity of moral values judged to be an
aspect of our common humanity have true or
supportable validity, and which are simply
context-determined aspects of specific tradi-
tions? The Values Project at Harvard tried
this same task years ago, but the time wasn't
ripe for its acceptance as an enduring enter-
prise. We are now faced with contradictory
claims of universal values and human rights
that are conflict-inducing and possibly capa-
ble of becoming justifications for cruel and ty-
rannical conditions, whether they refer to the
homeless in America, the rusticated in Cam-
bodia, or the stateless in the Near East. There
is a pressing need to go beyond moralist po-
larities, simple-minded advocacy, distaste for
our own society, or uninformed ethnocentric
judgments-relativism versus universalism-
to real world issues that must be faced coura-
geously. There is work to do, and anthropol-
ogists have an important role to play-if we
choose to do so.
References Cited
Bellah, R. H., R. Madsen, W. M. Sullivan, A.
Swidler, and S. M. Tipton
1985 Habits of the Heart. New York: Har-
per and Row.
Bidney, D.
1968 Cultural Relativism. I n Interna-
tional Encyclopedia of the Social Sci-
ences, Vol. 3. P. 545. New York: Mac-
millan/Free Press.
Donnelly, J.
1984 Cultural Relativism and Universal
Human Rights. Human Rights Quar-
terly 6(4):400-410.
1985 T h e Concept of Human Rights.
London: Croom Helm.
Geertz, C.
1984 Anti Anti-Relativism. American An-
thropologist 86:263-278.
Howard, R. E.
1986 Human Rights in Commonwealth
Africa. Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Little-
field.
Kopytoff, I., and S. Miers
1977 African Slavery as an Institution of
Marginality. In Slavery in Africa. S.
Miers and I. Kopytoff, eds. Pp. 3-81.
Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Legesse, A.
1980 Human Rights in African Political
Culture. In The Moral Imperatives of
Human Rights: A World Survey. K. W.
Thompson, ed. Pp. 21-34. Washington,
DC: University Press of America.
Nissim-Sabat, C.
1987 On Clifford Geertz and His "Anti
Anti-Relativism." American Anthropol-
ogist 89:935-938.
Shepherd, G. W., Jr.
1987 [ed.] Selected Papers from the Inter-
national Conference on Human Rights in
the African Context, Port Harcourt (June
9-1 1, 1987). Africa Today, 34 (1-2).
1990 Human Rights in an Unjust World.
The Carter Lectures on Africa, Series No.
3. Given a t the University of Florida,
Gainesville, Feb. 16. (In vol. 3, Carter
Studies on Africa, in preparation.)
Sieghart, P.
1986 The Lawful Rights of Mankind.
New York: Oxford University Press.
Fa'apua'a Fa'amii and Margaret
Mead
DEREKFREEMAN
Australian National Uniuersit_y
In this brief communication I report cru-
cially important new evidence on Margaret
Mead's Samoan researches of 1926.
According to Gerber ( 1975:126), all of her
Samoan informants of the early 1970s on the
island of Tutuila were agreed, in discussing
Samoan sexual behavior, that in the 1920s
"parents were extremely strict, and all daugh-
ters virginal." Further, "educated Samoans,"
who had read Coming of Age in Samoa, automat-
ically rejected what they euphemistically
called "all that sex stuff," and claimed that
"Mead's informants must have been telling
lies in order to tease her," a behavior known
to the Samoans as taufa'ase'e or taufa'alili.'
Gerber's account of 1975 has since been
supplemented by other comparable reports.
Thus, P. A. Cox, of the Department of Botany
in the University of California, Berkeley, writ-
ing in the American Scientist (1983:407), states:
"Several years ago during an ethnobotanical
survey in Ta'u, I asked several older Samoans
for their opinions on the Samoan studies of
Margaret Mead. They told me she could not
speak Samoan; this coupled with 'teasing' (tau
fa'ase'e) on the part of her informants, had
led her into serious error in her characteriza-
tion of Samoan culture."
Again, in the Pact& Islands Monthly ( 1984), a
Samoan, Falani Peters, has claimed that Com-
ing of Age in Samoa consists mainly of "chil-
dren's jokes, swallowed by the gullible Mead"
( P 9).
Peters, like the informants of Gerber and
Cox, is referring to what O'Meara (1988) has
termed "recreational lying," a practice which
is "one of the main forms of entertainment in
a Samoan village." Called tau fa'ase'e, tau
fa'alili, or ula (depending on the intentions of
its perpetrators), "recreational lying," as
O'Meara notes, "happens continually" with
"all ages" engaging in it: "people tell you sto-
ries," especially "about sex," to try to get you
to believe them, and then "sort of chuckle in-
side."
In my book of 1983, in discussing the sup-
position of Gerber's informants that Mead
was lied to in this way (an explanation which
I had myself frequently encountered in
Manu'a and elsewhere in Samoa) I concluded
(p. 291) that although this might have hap-
pened, the available reports were no more
than hearsay, and we could not "in the ab-
sence of corroborative evidence be sure about
the truth of this Samoan claim." Yet, as Ber-
nard has noted (1988:I 78), "it is not unheard
of for informants to lie to anthropologists."
With the provision of quite specific, direct
evidence by Mead's close friend and principal
informant of 1926, Fa'apua'a Fa'amu, our
knowledge of Mead's much discussed Samoan
researches has been transformed.
The account that follows is based on infor-
mation provided by Fa'apua'a Fa'amii, at Fi-
tiuta, Ta'u, Manu'a, in an interview on No-
vember 13, 1987, with Galea'i Poumele, the
then secretary of Samoan affairs in the govern-
ment of American Samoa; on May 2, 1988,
with Leulu F. Va'a, M.A. (Australian Na-
tional University), lecturer in Samoan studies
in the National University of Samoa; and from
my own questioning of Fa'apua'a on Novem-
ber 13, 1987.
Fa'amu, as she was called before being
given the nickname Fa'apua'a when she be-