Human Rights in the Maya Region: Global Politics, Cultural Contentions, and Moral Engagements - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0822342960 ISBN 13: 9780822342960

Publisher: Duke University Press Books, 2008

Synopsis

In recent years Latin American indigenous groups have regularly deployed the discourse of human rights to legitimate their positions and pursue their goals. Perhaps nowhere is this more evident than in the Maya region of Chiapas and Guatemala, where in the last two decades indigenous social movements have been engaged in ongoing negotiations with the state, and the presence of multinational actors has brought human rights to increased prominence. In this volume, scholars and activists examine the role of human rights in the ways that states relate to their populations, analyze conceptualizations and appropriations of human rights by Mayans in specific localities, and explore the relationship between the individualist and “universal” tenets of Western-derived concepts of human rights and various Mayan cultural understandings and political subjectivities.

The collection includes a reflection on the effects of truth-finding and documenting particular human rights abuses, a look at how Catholic social teaching validates the human rights claims advanced by indigenous members of a diocese in Chiapas, and several analyses of the limitations of human rights frameworks. A Mayan intellectual seeks to bring Mayan culture into dialogue with western feminist notions of women’s rights, while another contributor critiques the translation of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights into Tzeltal, an indigenous language in Chiapas. Taken together, the essays reveal a broad array of rights-related practices and interpretations among the Mayan population, demonstrating that global-local-state interactions are complex and diverse even within a geographically limited area. So too are the goals of indigenous groups, which vary from social reconstruction and healing following years of violence to the creation of an indigenous autonomy that challenges the tenets of neoliberalism.

Contributors: Robert M. Carmack, Stener Ekern, Christine Kovic, Xochitl Leyva Solano, Julián López García, Irma Otzoy, Pedro Pitarch, Álvaro Reyes, Victoria Sanford, Rachel Sieder, Shannon Speed, Rodolfo Stavenhagen, David Stoll, Richard Ashby Wilson

About this title

About the Author

Pedro Pitarch is Professor of Anthropology at the Complutense University in Madrid. His books include Ch’ulel: una etnografía de las almas tzeltales.

Shannon Speed is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of Rights in Rebellion: Indigenous Struggle and Human Rights in Chiapas and a co-editor of Dissident Women: Gender and Cultural Politics in Chiapas.

Xóchitl Leyva Solano is a researcher and professor at the Centro de Investigaciones e Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social (CIESAS) in Chiapas, México. She is the author of Poder y desarrollo regional and a co-editor of Encuentros Antropologicos: Power, Identity, and Mobility in Mexican Society.

From the Back Cover

"The notion of 'universal human rights' has had a checkered career over the past sixty years. Touted by some as one of the most effective tools for the empowerment and liberation of women and the poor in the so-called third world, it is denounced by others as a self-serving cultural imposition on the part of the Western world. "Human Rights in the Maya Region" takes us well beyond these extreme positions. By focusing on an exemplary case--the diverse experiences of the Mayan peoples of Chiapas and Guatemala--and never belittling the existing power asymmetries or the complexities of cultural translation, this coherent and well-grounded volume enlightens us on the multiple ways in which local groups make effective use of rights discourses on the basis of their distinct conceptions of persons and the world. At a more general level, the volume offers a nuanced and compelling explanation of the conjunctures of culture, rights, and power that are at play whenever 'rights' are deployed anywhere in the world. The volume will be of great value to those interested in human rights, indigenous peoples, social movements, traditional law, and the cultural-political dynamics of globalization."--Arturo Escobar, author of "Territories of Difference: Place, Movements, Life, " Redes

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

HUMAN RIGHTS IN THE MAYA REGION

Global Politics, Cultural Contentions, and Moral Engagements

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2008 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4296-0

Contents

Abbreviations..............................................................................................................................................................................viiIntroduction Shannon Speed and Xochitl Leyva Solano.......................................................................................................................................11. Cultural Rights and Human Rights: A Social Science Perspective Rodolfo Stavenhagen.....................................................................................................272. Perspectives on the Politics of Human Rights in Guatemala Robert M. Carmack............................................................................................................513. Legal Globalization and Human Rights: Constructing the Rule of Law in Postconflict Guatemala? Rachel Sieder............................................................................674. The Labyrinth of Translation: A Tzeltal Version of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights Pedro Pitarch.............................................................................915. Are Human Rights Destroying the Natural Balance of All Things? The Difficult Encounter between International Law and Community Law in Mayan Guatemala Stener Ekern.....................1236. "Here It's Different": The Ch'orti' and Human Rights Training Julin Lpez Garca......................................................................................................1457. Indigenous Law and Gender Dialogues Irma Otzoy.........................................................................................................................................1718. Human Rights, Land Conflicts, and Memory of the Violence in the Ixil Country of Northern Quich David Stoll............................................................................1879. Global Discourses on the Local Terrain: Human Rights in Chiapas Shannon Speed and Xochitl Leyva Solano.................................................................................20710. Breaking the Reign of Silence: Ethnography of a Clandestine Cemetery Victoria Sanford.................................................................................................23311. Rights of the Poor: Progressive Catholicism and Indigenous Resistance in Chiapas Christine Kovic......................................................................................25712. "Asumiendo Nuestra Propia Defensa": Resistance and the Red de Defensores Comunitarios in Chiapas Shannon Speed and Alvaro Reyes.......................................................279Final Comments Making Rights Meaningful for Mayas: Reflections on Culture, Rights, and Power Richard Ashby Wilson.........................................................................305References.................................................................................................................................................................................323Contributors...............................................................................................................................................................................357Index......................................................................................................................................................................................361

Chapter One

Cultural Rights and Human Rights A Social Science Perspective

The Problem of Cultural Rights

The issue of cultural rights within the general debate about human rights forms part of a wider concern about the location of culture in international discourse. The contributions of the United Nations (UN) have proven rather modest in this field. Article 15 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1966, mainly refers to the right of everyone to take part in cultural life, to enjoy the benefits of scientific progress and its applications, and to benefit from the protection of scientific, literary, or artistic works. Article 13 posits the right of everyone to education, which "shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and the sense of its dignity." While cultural rights are also referred to in numerous international instruments, as well as in several United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) conventions and recommendations, the full implications of cultural rights as human rights remain to be explored. This essay aims to contribute to the debate from a social science perspective.

Cultural rights are closely related to other individual rights and fundamental freedoms such as the freedom of expression, the freedom of religion and belief, the freedom of association, and the right to education. Cultural rights have not been credited with much importance in theoretical texts on human rights and, as Asbjrn Eide has pointed out, are treated rather as a residual category. Yet states do have obligations to ensure the respect, protection, and fulfillment of each of these rights, and these obligations should be spelled out in the case of cultural rights and their various interpretations (Eide 1994: 233-38).

While some cultural rights can be dealt with exclusively within the framework of universal individual human rights, the relationship between culture and human rights is such that a broader approach is warranted. Lyndel Prott argues that cultural rights-particularly those pertaining to the preservation of cultural heritage, the cultural identity of a specific people, and cultural development-are sometimes considered "peoples' rights," and she calls for renewed efforts to frame such issues in international legal terms (1988: 92-106). In this essay I shall discuss some ideas concerning these issues.

If cultural rights are to be understood as any individual's right to culture, then ideally this term should have an unequivocal meaning. Yet even a cursory look at the way in which some international documents and legal instruments have dealt with the concept of culture shows a variety of usages. The right of a people to its own artistic, historical, and cultural wealth is stated in Article 14 of the Algiers Declaration on the Rights of Peoples, adopted by a nongovernmental meeting of prominent experts in 1976. It has no legal standing in international law, not having been sanctioned by an intergovernmental body, but as Ian Brownlie (1988) recognizes, it has had "a certain influence," particularly to the extent that its ideas were reflected in the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights, adopted by the Organization of African Unity in 1981.

UNESCO has asserted the right of every people to develop a culture and has proclaimed a "right to cultural identity," whereas the Algiers Declaration refers to the right to respect of cultural identity, and the right of a people not to have an alien culture imposed on it. The rights of persons belonging to ethnic, religious, or linguistic minorities to enjoy their own culture, to profess and practice their own religion, and to use their own language, in community with the other members of their group, are found in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (Art. 27), and they were rearmed in the 1992 UN Declaration on the Rights of Persons Belonging to National or Ethnic, Religious and Linguistic Minorities, which also calls on states to take measures enabling persons belonging to minorities to develop their culture.

The Genocide Convention, adopted in 1948, defines genocide, which it declares a crime under international law, as the commission of certain acts "with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such" (Art. 2). Besides the actual killing of people, these acts include "causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group ... forcibly transferring children of the group to another group, etc." Thomas Buergenthal rightly argues that by outlawing the destruction of national, ethnic, racial, and religious groups, the Genocide Convention formally recognizes the right of these groups to exist as groups, which surely must be considered the most fundamental of all cultural rights (1988: 49).

Underlying Conceptions of Culture

A careful reading of the above instruments will show that they refer indirectly to various distinct conceptions of culture that are not always clearly spelled out in the texts and that are in fact often used rather loosely in general discourse. A systematic treatment of cultural rights as human rights will require a somewhat more rigorous conceptualization of cultural terminology.

CULTURE AS CAPITAL

One common view identifies culture with the accumulated material heritage of humankind in its entirety, or of particular human groups, including monuments and artifacts. According to this position, the right to culture would entail individuals' equal right of access to this accumulated cultural capital. An extension of this view is the right to cultural development. Many governments and international organizations have established cultural development as a specific process of cultural change, which some people see as parallel or complementary to other forms of development, for example, economic, political, or social development.

The argument appears to go like this: if economic development means increasing goods and services, a rising gross national product (GNP), and a better distribution thereof among the population, then cultural development would mean "more culture" and better access to culture by more categories of people. Very often this is interpreted as a purely quantitative process: the publication of more books, the establishment of libraries, the wider circulation of newspapers and magazines, the building of museums, a higher number of TV sets, national budgets for cultural activities, and so on. The quantitative growth of cultural services is sometimes equated with the concept of cultural development, yet relatively little attention has been paid in official reports to the more qualitative dimensions of this process. What are the nature and the contents of such services? Can an increase in the number of TV channels really be equated with cultural development?

It is often assumed that there is consensus on the meaning of "cultural development," but it makes for a doubtful proposition. One could argue, for instance, that many of the general statements about the right to cultural development-implying more of the so-called cultural services-too often hide the fact of underlying cultural conflicts in our societies, cultural conflicts similar to social, political, and economic ones. These conflicts occur over the recognition and identity of culturally defined groups, or about the nature of "national" culture, or the aims of cultural policies. One widely accepted proposition proclaims the existence of a universal culture, one that only some people can enjoy, while others may not have access to it. It follows that a right to culture should entail a more equitable access to this universal culture.

This, however, is not the only possible approach, for the right to culture may also be interpreted as the right to a group's own culture, and not necessarily to some general or supposedly universal culture, because these two concepts are not necessarily coterminous. In fact, it has been pointed out repeatedly that so-called universal culture more often than not means the worldwide imposition of Western culture through the hegemonic practices of Western powers from the time of colonialism onward. To be sure, UNESCO's efforts at universalizing the cultural heritage of humankind are a step away from the Eurocentric tradition.

CULTURE AS CREATIVITY

A second widely held view does not necessarily regard culture as accumulated or existing cultural capital, but rather as the process of artistic and scientific creation. Accordingly, every society has certain individuals who create culture (or, alternatively, who interpret or perform cultural works). Within this perspective, the right to culture means the right of individuals to create their cultural oeuvres with no restrictions, and the right of all persons to enjoy free access to these creations (museums, concerts, theater, libraries, etc.). Cultural policies are therefore intended to further the position of the individual cultural creator in society (the artist, the writer, the performer), and this creator's right to free cultural expression has become one of the most cherished human rights in contemporary times. The cultural creator in fact symbolizes the freedoms of thought and expression, which have emerged as two of the motivating forces behind human rights struggles throughout history. Let us simply remember the international outcry that usually occurs when artists or writers are banned, exiled, or imprisoned (let alone executed) by authoritarian regimes (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Kurdish writers in Turkey, or Salman Rushdie come to mind).

The view of culture as the result of the labor of cultural specialists has led to a widely held distinction between "high" and "low" culture. In Western countries, at least, cultural debates revolve around the relative weight and significance of elite culture and popular culture, the latter being defined as belonging to the sphere of the performing arts, usually channeled through the mass media and targeted at specific audiences by the cultural industries (e.g., pop music and pop stars, cult films, fashionable ways of dressing, youth culture promoted by highly paid and publicized promoters and performers). There is another view of popular culture that I will deal with below, but official policies directed toward the development of culture usually focus on supposedly elite culture. In this case, cultural rights are easily identified with the rights of the cultural creators, the cultural specialists.

CULTURE AS A TOTAL WAY OF LIFE

A third view of culture comes to us from the discipline of anthropology. It takes culture to mean the sum total of the material and spiritual activities and products of a given social group, which distinguishes it from other similar groups. Thus understood, culture is also seen as a coherent, self-contained system of values and symbols, and as a set of practices that a specific cultural group reproduces over time and that provides individuals with the required signposts and meanings for behavior and social relationships in everyday life.

The peoples of the world are the carriers of many thousands of distinct cultures. In some instances, all or most of a country's population share a common culture; in others, a state is made up of a variety of different cultures. There is no consensus about the actual number of existing cultures or about criteria for the definition of membership (who belongs, who is excluded), though this is a crucial issue, particularly in relation to the problem of cultural rights. Similarly, there is no hard and fast way to draw a line distinguishing one culture from another. This is neither possible nor indeed necessary for our understanding of cultural dynamics. Generally speaking, specialists estimate that in contrast to the world's more or less two hundred independent states, there are about ten thousand distinct ethnic groups or ethnies, based mainly on linguistic differences. Linguistic differences serve as one of the main criteria, but by no means the only one, for distinguishing one culture from another.

Cultures are not static. On the contrary, every identifiable culture is historically rooted and changes over time. Indeed, cultural change and the constant dynamic recreation of cultures are universal phenomena. A culture may be said to have particular vitality if it is capable of preserving its identity even as it incorporates change, just as a specific human being will change over time but retains her or his distinct identity.

There is, however, a danger in this approach of treating culture as an object, a "thing" that exists separately of the social space in which various social actors interrelate. Anthropology reminds us that the ethnic (cultural) identity of any group depends not so much on the content of its culture as on the social boundaries that define the spaces of social relationships by which membership is attributed in one or the other ethnic group (see, e.g., Barth 1969; Thompson, Ellis, and Wildavsky 1990).

Following from this critique, recent scholarship treats culture as something that is constantly constructed, reconstructed, invented, and reinvented by ever-changing subjects; the emphasis here is on the way people perceive and speak about their culture, rather than on the culture itself (which by this criterium would have no objective existence outside of the individual's subjectivity). Customs and traditions are inherent elements of all observable cultures, yet traditions are constantly being invented and reinvented, and customs, by which people carry on their daily lives, regularly change to conform to varying historical circumstances, even as they strive to maintain social continuity. National cultures, which are very closely linked to state activity through governmental educational and cultural policies, are imagined collectively in historical processes, and nations are sometimes described as "imagined communities." So while cultures are given objective existence (people are born into a culture, social groups are identified by their cultures), they are also subjectively and variously constructed and fashioned by myriad individuals in continuing social interactions (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983; Anderson 1983).

Why and how cultures persist, change, adapt, or disappear constitutes a special field of inquiry, and such questions are intimately related to economic, political, and territorial processes. At any given time, in any given area, there may be majority and minority, dominant and dominated, hegemonic and subordinate cultural groups. UNESCO's World Commission on Culture and Development writes: "A country need not contain only one culture. Many countries, perhaps most, are multi-cultural, multi-national, multi-ethnic and contain a multiplicity of languages, religions and ways of living. A multi-cultural country can reap great benefits from its pluralism, but also runs the risk of cultural conflicts" (UNESCO 1995: 25). The International Commission on Education for the Twenty-First Century argues that one of the problems of the future is "the multiplicity of languages, an expression of humanity's cultural diversity. There are an estimated 6,000 languages in the world, of which a dozen are spoken by over 100 million people" (UNESCO 1996: 40).

While so-called culture wars (ideological tensions and conflicts over cultural issues such as education, language, cultural policies, etc.) may occur in well-integrated societies without actually splitting them asunder (generally because other kinds of social, economic, and political institutions help keep the contenders together), in other cases cultural issues have become powerful mobilizing forces in political strife around the world.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0822342960
• ISBN 13: 9780822342960
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 392
• Editor: Pitarch Pedro, Speed Shannon, Leyva-Solano Xochitl