IDEOLOGICAL REFUGE v JURISPRUDENCE OF INSURGENCY : CULTURAL RELATIVISM AND UNIVERSALISM IN THE HUMAN RIGHTS DISCOURSE

1. ABSTRACT
Notions of Human Rights over the last few decades have shaped global law, politics and governance to the point of revolutionising many aspects of international or global relations . Consequently, the ideological frameworks underlying conceptions of human rights have been engaged in contestations, sometimes taking dimensions that are mutually antagonistic and tending to portray the ‘other’ as imperialistic or suppressive. Cultural Relativism has largely been poised against Universalism in addressing the debates on the definition and scope of application of human rights. A consideration of many criticisms of cultural relativism (as an ideological refuge) and universalism (as a jurisprudence of insurgency) on political, legal, anthropological and sociological grounds would seem to fall short of obliterating all merits of any of the two ideologies. It seems that while exposing the good and bad sides of each ideology, such considerations often highlight the possibility of a middle path that neither qualifies as universalism nor relativism as conceived and advocated in many of the ensuing contestations.

2. INTRODUCTION
Since the 1947 pronouncements of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in its ‘Statement on Human Rights’ , and the subsequent ‘promulgation’ of the declaration, various theoretical, legal, anthropological, religious and political contestations have besieged the universalist and relativist ideologies in challenges and counter-challenges to the notion of the universality of human rights. Many years since Boas muted on the reasoning that came to be defined as Cultural Relativism, it seems that now more than ever, the contests have grown to a point where there is a need to incisively examine the merits, if any, which may be left with these ideologies often in mutually scathing criticisms.
Clearly, the UDHR has with little resistance gained wider global appeal to date, a trend Donnelly describes as having ideologically hegemonic effects . Indeed, China only recently acknowledged publicly, the ‘universality of human rights’ on Wednesday 19 January 2011 in a meeting with Barrack Obama. Conversely, prevalence of abuse of human rights under regimes tagged ‘repressive’, casts a further shadow on cultural relativism, an ideology often linked with the stance of such regimes. Many critics of universalism on the other hand often associate it with western imperialism. The universalist ideology has however enjoyed greater favour, and would seem a step short of an absolute ideological victory cry .

3. AIM
This script examines what may be left of the merits and substances, after a consideration of universalism and cultural relativism from a perspective that is critical of the two, but mostly relativism, with a view to identifying the implications that may follow. In so doing, we engage historical, legal, political, sociological and anthropological ramifications that interface with the challenge on universalism and cultural relativism in the context of the human rights discourse. I adopt an approach that is dominant today- one of antagonism towards cultural relativism, while subsequently extending same to universalism.

4. CULTURAL RELATIVISM: EVALUATING THE IDEOLOGY
The notion that a practice, value, norm and law of a society should be understood and appraised by people outside of that society only in that society’s terms and standards came to be ‘Cultural Relativism’. Thus, ‘...an individual’s behaviour, thought, emotion, perception, and sensation are relative to, and bound by the culture of the group he or she belongs to’ . In this context, every custom is as valid and legitimate as others since none is judged by the standards and workings of another. This effectively precludes the assessment of a culture by some ‘universal objective standard’ which many contend, is a practical impossibility as cultures emanate from specific societal contexts.
Cultural Relativism owes its rise to ethnocentrism which had become prevalent in the early 20th century anthropology. Boas countered ethnocentric approaches to appraising other cultures from the western perspective by his ideas which have thence dominated and come to be identified as cultural relativism. This premise necessarily betrays the fact that the two ideologies create, recreate and reinforce each other since universalism as manifested in the dominant approach to studies in the age, can be credited with prompting the protest ‘voicing’ that is relativism. The AAA’s statement on human rights reflected the relativist perspective on the UDHR, and since then, it has been argued in politics, law, sociology and anthropology that on the one hand, the declaration and the whole idea of human rights as understood and advocated within the international system merely reflects a particular ethnocentric perspective and in this case, the Euro-American perspective. To extend this ‘particular’ ideology to the rest of the world is thus logically faulty at best and maliciously imperial at worst.
On the other hand, human rights ratings and statistics made by relevant bodies such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch are relied upon to commend or condemn countries with ‘good’ and ‘bad’ performances respectively. Ironically, countries with the worst performance indexes are supposedly exogenous to the ‘west’ culturally and historically. An appraisal of merits or otherwise of relativism therefore defaults into a consideration of certain factors that may be termed ‘political’ on the international arena, and reflected in the academies around the world as well.
TO BE CONTINUED...